Is Phobos's Garbage Collector utterly broken? (Phobos vs Tango)

[Sean Kelly]

kenny wrote:
> ok you convinced me... I'll switch to tango now -- or at least start heading that direction..
> 
> I use dmd 2.003 at the moment (it is fast enough for me, I guess... postgre is the slow one actually), and I noticed that it definitely doesn't work with 2.003 at all.

Tango hasn't transitioned to D 2.0 yet.  Maintaining parallel versions 
of the library isn't a terribly appealing notion, though I suppose it 
may become necessary at some point.  Also, I had been worried that some 
of the existing features might change (though it seems like this 
probably won't actually happen), and because the work involved in a port 
to 2.0 will likely be fairly significant, I don't want to have to do it 
more than once.

> Another thing that's really awesome about phobos / d is that the documentation is 100% available offline. Personally, I have the worlds worst internet connection on this planet. I would definitely be needing the documentation to be available offline to be able to use tango effectively. I see some doc stuff, but it looks like css and js files (I assume that the html is generated somehow) -- but what about all of the good information on the wiki?

I believe there is some work underway to generate offline information 
from the wiki, but I'm not sure how far along it is.  I agree that 
offline documentation is very useful, as I do most of my D programming 
on the train.

> Other than that, I was checking out the docs and tango looks really really good. I really like the threading stuff you've got. There are so many really good features -- I'm actually pretty excited.
> 
> So here's the questions:
> 1. when is dmd 2.0 support? (I guess I can downgrade to dmd 1.0 for some time)

Not sure.  After the conference I may start looking into it.

> 2. will all the documentation be available offline?

Yes, but no timetable yet.

> 3. what other features are way faster than the phobos equiv?

IO is the stand-out in terms of performance.  I think regex would be 
faster with a rewrite if we (or someone else) can find the time for it 
(we use the Phobos version right now).  And I'm not sure if it matters, 
but I've been told our threading implementation is more robust, and 
certain calls there are definitely faster than Phobos given the way each 
are implemented.


Sean