The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Lutger wrote:

> 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.

A way to ensure that there are common, good and well defined interfaces is
what I try to hint at. I don't think all of those can be properly achieved
by letting one vendor decide. I also think that having a common place to
have the compiler independent implementation would help this goal, ie that
compiler vendors don't need to write this themselves.

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