Tango / Phobos / future dilemma

[Sascha Katzner]

Chris Wright wrote:
> Except the Phobos runtime and garbage collector are inferior to those of 
> Tango.

I think it is kind of silly to debate what parts of which library are 
superior, if we want to rectify this situation. Fact is that we have 
currently 2 incompatible D languages (if you doesn't count D 2.0), which 
is a big bummer for the growth of the D community. So either one of them 
has to go or they have to merge in some way. Since neither Walter nor 
the Tango team seems willing to give up, a merge is the only way.

The only question is how to do that in detail.

> Plus the result would not be DRY: there'd be two IO systems, for 
> instance. Also, Tango has changes to object.d, I believe, for things 
> like stack traces on exceptions.

I see no reason why those two IO systems couldn't coexist on top of a 
common low level cache. Sure you have to change some parts of both 
libraries, but I'm confident that in the long run this could be more 
than worthwhile.

> Given this, Phobos would adopt the Tango runtime, which would 
> effectively make Phobos an extension of Tango. Except that it would be 
> updated to new dmd releases sooner.

It's circumstantial how you call it. The important point is that they 
both merge and this is only possible if both sides are willing for 
concessions.

LLAP,
Sascha