The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

Lutger lutger.blijdestijn at gmail.com
Sat Aug 16 04:23:10 PDT 2008


Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:

> Lutger wrote:
...
>> How does it ignore it? It sounds rather like the opposite to me: the very
>> existence of multiple runtimes and the vested interest in those runtimes
>> (Tango's primarily) are the key reason for unification.
> 
> Unification, yes. You misunderstood my point, which is that the runtime
> implementation (not the compiler specific portion and direct language
> support) should, IMO, be independent. As long as Walter/DigitalMars is the
> developer of the language itself, it will be natural that eventual new
> features that the language requires from the runtime, will be bootstrapped
> by code from Walter, but I think Sean's work on the runtime in Tango shows
> that such initial implementation can have large potential for
> improvements.

Ok I think I understand and agree that some room for this potential would be
good, of course. What I'm worried about is that D libraries will depend on
specific api (not only implementation) of the runtime, which could lead to
a mess when we'll have more and more of such implementations.

Simply put, I'm afraid that in the future to make a cross-platform code
we'll have to do something equivalent to a C++ header file consisting of
dozens of bizarre #ifdef ... #elif etc. logic. Or worse, need a massive
porting effort or wrapping libraries a la tangobos if you need a D library
developed for a different compiler.

Perhaps more interfaces could be standardized? I don't know. I'd hate to see
a thread in some years called 'phobos vs tango vs dil vs dang vs llvmdc vs
etc.' ;) </hyperbole>







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