Two standard libraries?

[Steve Teale]

Bill Baxter Wrote:

> Steve Teale wrote:
> > It bothers me that Phobos and Tango seem to be completely divergent.
> > One of the things that makes a language successful is that it has a
> > good standard library.  It seems that with D, you have to be a
> > betting man - which standard library will prevail.
> 
> I think the only issue is the fact that they're incompatible.  Maybe 
> that's what you meant by 'divergent', but to me 'divergent' just means 
> going in different directions, as in creating diversity.  The existence 
> of a big Java-style library like Tango can only be seen as a plus for D, 
> except for that darn incompatibility issue.
> 
> Tango could have been made compatible with phobos.  The reasons for 
> making it a replacement for phobos rather than a regular library are (as 
> I understand it):
> 1) They wanted to be in charge of their own garbage collector
> 2) Phobos' exception hierarchy makes no sense and they wanted to fix that.
> 
> And there were a few other minor things that annoyed them about Phobos, 
> but by themselves I suspect wouldn't have been enough to warrant 
> creating a schism.  (printf declared in object.d, toString actually 
> returning utf-8 not just any old string).
> 
> It would be great if at the D conference the Tango folks could sit down 
> and have a serious face-to-face with Walter about what it would take to 
> make Tango D-compatible once again -- or perhaps that should be 
> upgrading D to be Tango-compatible.  I'm thinking things like getting 
> Walter to fix the exception hierarchy in Phobos, and maybe doing 
> whatever it takes to make the garbage collector pluggable to allow 
> experimentation in that area without creating a schism.
> 
> --bb

Yes, I did mean incompatible, but I'd had a couple of beers at the time.  If the issues you describe are all that is at the core of the schism, we should really try to get it sorted.  It's really frustrating to find that half of the things you'd like to use out of DSource are going to make you have to do major surgery on your existing code.