The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Sean Kelly]

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.

This is why the Tango runtime is designed the way it is -- it eliminates 
all dependency on standard library implementation.  The API exposed is 
very simply and completely portable.

> 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.

And this is the reason for making the runtime separately available from 
/any/ standard library :-)


Sean