phobos / tango / ares

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Bill Baxter wrote:

> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> 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 :-)
> 
> Ok.  Thanks for the explanation.
> There were some comments before about "porting phobos to tango" that
> just made it sound like a bigger job that it apparently is in fact.

I believe someone mentioned implementing the phobos API using Tango.

> 
> As many people have noticed, phobos doesn't really change very quickly
> <g> so I suspect it wouldn't be too much work to maintain compatibility
> once achieved.  Patches seem like a good way to go.  If you have a patch
> against phobos then applying it to new versions of phobos would likely
> just work, since the changes to phobos are few.
> 
> --bb

If someone wants to help mantaining the tango.phobos project, they are
welcome to do so. The project both has a Trac environment and a forum in
phpBB.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango