Polishing D - suggestions and comments

[Dan]

Jarrod Wrote:

> On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:52:19 -0500, Daniel wrote:
> 
> > Walter is, and ought to be, focusing his efforts on the language more
> > than the libraries.
> > 
> > Oddly, I would argue that all libraries are simply stop-gap fixes for
> > missing or poorly implemented language features; indeed most programming
> > code tends to be.
> > 
> > However, D has phobos, there was mango, now tango, and work has been
> > done on a tangobos.  The fact that the library keeps changing shows that
> > D's language features actually have an impact, as they frequently
> > replace or integrate library features.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Dan
> 
> To claim Phobos is not a part of D is to claim the C stdlib is not a part 
> of C. 
> Phobos is a part of D, and it's a very important part of D too (hell we 
> can't even have classes without Object.d). Walter is the father of Phobos 
> and although he allows others to contribute to it, he is the one who 
> decides what to add to Phobos and how to add it. Yes, Walter should focus 
> on developing the language of course, but he also has to decide what the 
> *standard* library is going to be since he is after all the head project 
> manager of both Phobos and D.
> I emphasize the word *standard* because right now, we don't have a 
> standard. Unless you include a bunch of versioning/mixin hacks, we 
> currently have code that won't even compile on different workstations 
> because of two very different core libraries that are totally 
> incompatible. So now we're stuck with an annoying rift.
> Tangobos is a step in the right direction to get compatibility back, but 
> at the moment it's just a band-aid solution.
> 
> All I want to see is a standard, be it Phobos with all the cool stuff 
> Tango adds, or a Tango with all the nice things Phobos has. But this 
> isn't going to happen unless one of the dev teams concedes already :|

Fair assessment.  I think Tango is more open source and takes the load off Walter.  It's just simply too heavyweight for me to dare use it; so library developers go to Tango and library users still go to Phobos.  : p

That guy who developed the cool Agner Fog optimized mixin algorithm should get access to an AST.  I'm sure he could write a kick-ass lib.

Regards,
Dan