Phobos vs Tango! What's your opinion?

[Sean Kelly]

Dan wrote:
> As I just said in a different thread.  Tango has this OO gleam in it's eye.  It's implementing classes for the craziest of things.  Strings don't need a class!  Implementing a class to store an array is *hugely* wasteful.

For the most part, I think Tango is OO when appropriate.  The objects 
that exist do so to retain state, and it is rarely, if ever, necessary 
for a user to define their own objects to use Tango.  But that aside, a 
String is an object, be it a class or a struct.  I suppose there's no 
reason for it not to be a struct--it simply hasn't come up before, and 
no one has ever complained.

> Especially since you can already use:
> 
> char[] foo(char[] s){
>  s ~= " world";
> }
> 
> char[] myS = "hello";
> 
> myS.foo();

Yup.  Tango may have a String class, but it isn't used very often.  Its 
real advantage in my opinion is UniString, a generic parent class for 
String which doesn't restrict the underlying char type.  This isn't 
something that's available with built-in arrays.

> Classes are the Microsoft Windows of the programming world; opague, costly, slow, and they have burdensome licensing.

I disagree.  Heap allocation may be slower than stack allocation, but 
reference passing is fast, and it is often useful to have control over 
copy semantics and such.  Also, guaranteed reference semantics have some 
very real advantages in terms of what's possible in a language.


Sean