Right now, what's the most important for the success and adoption of D?

[Janice Caron]

On 9/30/07, Don Clugston <dac at nospam.com.au> wrote:
> That is exactly true, and it's unacceptable for a standard library. You've
> missed the point. The original question, was, "what's most important for the
> success of D". And my answer is, a standard library that continues to be developed.

I didn't miss that point. It's just a question of language. The
original poster said /the/ standard library, and /the/ standard
library is Phobos.

I would love for a third-party library to come along and sit beside
Phobos and become established as /a/ standard. Unfortunately, the only
contender for that role right now appears to be Tango, which requires
one to rip out the D runtime and replace it before it will work,
rendering it utterly incompatible with Phobos.

Libraries should be standalone things (in my opinion). That is, if I
want a String class, I should just be able to import a module, and
nothing else. I'm sure a string module probably exists within Tango,
but if I can't import it without first having to render Phobos useless
then I'm never going to use it.

So I would be more than happy if there could be some third-party
modules which we could import without interfering with Phobos, and if
this collection of modules became known as a "standard" because of
it's fantastic utility - great!


> Again --- that was not the question! You're assuming that forever,
> (1) Walter is the only person who can develop Phobos AND
> (2) Phobos is the standard library.
> It is crucial to the future of D that one of these two changes.

Apart from the word "forever", that is correct. I do assume that
currently (1) and (2) are the case. (1) can only change if Walter
delegates, or makes Phobos open source or something, and /that's up to
him/. (2) is true because Walter says so, but that doesn't prevent
addtional third party libraries from existing, and nor does it stop
any combination of them becoming seen as "standard".