D : Not for me anymore

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
>> Walter is a true compiler expert, but I think he wants to leave the
>> development of libraries to those who are more experienced with
>> different kinds of frameworks. Besides, he already has more than enough
>> work in extending the language and maintaining the compiler.
> 
> What I'm mindful of is I endorsed DWT as the official D gui library,
> which promptly killed it.

LOL. It's just that I really don't believe there can be only one
"official" GUI library. Even Java has AWT, Swing, SWT and now they're
even porting QT to Java. There are always at least a) licensing, b)
technical and c) political issues involved.

Most of the D libraries have been released under very liberal licenses.
I don't think closed source businesses have anything against that.
Neither does the open source community. Having several competing gui
libraries gives best of the both worlds to the developers.

But a standard library is more tightly coupled with the core language.
One of the strong points in Java has been that it's easy to use the
basic stuff like collections and I/O. These have advanced a lot since
Java 1.0, but still there has been less competing libraries in this area
than for C++ (AFAIK). There is already a lot of basic stuff ready for D
out there under a very liberal license. If only they could be an
integral part of the language distribution.

The "standard library" is IMO missing things like templated collections,
a clone of Java I/O libraries (streams), a String-class (many people
really want it), some network code and maybe more libraries for
multithreaded applications.