Vision for the first semester of 2016

tsbockman via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Tue Jan 26 13:03:01 PST 2016


On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 20:43:29 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 20:38:16 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
>> It's not like you could just reallocate all the effort that 
>> goes into Phobos towards the compiler and stuff.
>
> My impression is that the majority of the contributors to 
> Phobos are capable D programmers.
>
> DMD is implemented in D now, no longer C++, so with refactoring 
> and documentation I think a lot more programmers are qualified 
> to hack on the compiler.

The language in which DMD is written has never been the main 
barrier to working on it. The real issue is that DMD is a huge, 
poorly documented code base in which most of the various 
components are tightly coupled to everything else. This makes it 
both intimidating and time consuming to get started hacking on it.

In contrast, Phobos (although still very large) is fairly well 
documented, and has much less coupling between most of its 
components. Moreover, what coupling there is, is easily 
understood because the average (experienced) D programmer already 
knows his way around the standard library, from the outside.

Also, you skipped past the "uninterested" part - this is a 
volunteer project, remember?


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