questions on PhanTango 'merger' - long-term vision

Lars Ivar Igesund larsivar at igesund.net
Thu Oct 11 01:14:40 PDT 2007


BCS wrote:

> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
>> 
>>> So in my view, any kind of merger is first (and possibly only) about
>>> runtime
>>> compatibility. If one is to merge everything in some way, it may, for
>>> mantainance reasons (less core functionality to mantain, but a lot of
>>> work
>>> to do the initial wrap), make sense to build one of the API's on top
>>> of the
>>> other. Building for instance Tango IO on top of Phobos don't make sense
>>> though (at least to me), as it would degrade performance. Doing the
>>> opposite, would probably create other subtle differences due to
>>> Phobos' IO
>>> going via the C runtime.
>>> Lars Ivar Igesund
>>> blog at http://larsivi.net
>>> DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
>>> Dancing the Tango
>> 
>> 
>> A question: is it a good thing that Phobos depends on the c runtime? I'm
>> not sure but won't it be better if the future merged D standard library
>> wouldn't need the c runtime at all? (less dependencies and maybe better
>> performance?)
> 
> at a bare minimum, you will need the OS system call API. That (on most
> systems) is C. You can't completely divorce your self from C and there
> is a lot of good low level "paint on the metal" C code out there. D is
> not going to do better than that stuff so why not just use it.

Performance wise, Tango is doing better than the C runtime (or at least the
combination of Phobos+C runtime) for the testcases we know of. That the OS
uses C as an interface to it's syscalls is not a relevant point in this
dicussion.

Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango




More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list