phobos / tango / ares

[Sean Kelly]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
>> Frits van Bommel wrote:
>>
>>> Which one to use is hard to say at this point. I've been trying out
>>> Tango since its release and I like it but I sometimes miss some parts of
>>> Phobos. Whether this is because Phobos is just more familiar to me or
>>> actually better is hard to say...
>>
>> Note that what you miss that you feel you have in Phobos, is very much 
>> part
>> of the feedback we would like.
> 
> I'm having trouble understanding first why Tango had to be made mutually 
> exclusive to Phobos (is it just changes to object.d? were those really 
> necessary?)

The Tango runtime code contains quite a few differences compared to 
Phobos, but the bulk of these are hidden from the user.  Some of the 
more visible differences are that Error has been dropped, Exception 
reworked, Object.toString() changed to Object.toUtf8(), and the Thread 
object has a slightly different interface.  During development, both in 
Ares/Mango and now in Tango, no effort was made to either deliberately 
mimic or to differ from Phobos.  Rather, a design was chosen that simply 
made the most sense.  That said, a great deal of effort has been made to 
avoid changing anything that feels like a language feature, and it was 
sometimes difficult to determine where the line should be drawn.  The 
Object.toString() issue sits pretty squarely on that line, and a great 
deal of discussion took place before that particular change was agreed upon.

 > and if object.d differences are the only reason, then I
> still don't really get why most Phobos code can't still be imported as 
> is or with trivial changes.  For example, phobos' std.path doesn't seem 
> to have any direct dependencies on the gc API or on a particular version 
> of object.d.  What's the issue?

Most Phobos code can be imported as is or with trivial changes, it's 
simply a matter of taking the time to do so.  Frank actually did this a 
while back for his own use, and the project now lives on dsource as 
tango.phobos.  I am sure it could do with some dedicated maintainers -- 
developing one library is quite enough for me :-)


Sean