Polishing D - suggestions and comments

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Jarrod wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:01:26 +0100, Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> 
>> More curiosity from me, what in Phobos do you consider cool, and at the
>> same time miss in Tango?
> 
> Cool phobos stuff:
> toString. 'Nuff said.

? Tango has toString too.

> toStringz is also much easier to find. I had to follow a bug report under
> trac that I found with the search feature, just to find the same thing in
> Tango.

It is indeed considered a C compatibility routine which may make it harder
to find. This particular case is due to a wish to keep C out of the main
portions of the Tango user API which we try to keep to D as much as
possible. It is still avaialable through the stdc package though.

> 
> In Phobos the API layout and naming conventions 'feel' more right to me.
> If I need something solved with the library, I can generally find it
> quickly and easily because of its obvious naming, then just look up the
> documentation and within a few minutes I have a solution.
> On the other hand Tango made me fiddle around a bit. A lot of API felt
> unfamiliar to me for some reason (perhaps my heavy C background?), and
> the documentation doesn't seem as clean. For example, just to find out
> how to add a pointer to the garbage collector made me have to search the
> trac just to find it. In Phobos it was pretty much instantly apparent.
> 'std.gc'. I mean it's so apparent I can recall it off the top of my head,
> and it's not like I've used it more than the tango one which I can't at
> all recall the location of without looking it up (I remember it was an
> object called GC though if that's a consolation, but I only remember that
> because I aliased stc.gc to GC so as to have minimum versioning issues)

Yes, the Tango API docs could be much better organized, and we know this.
This is made a much more important facet of your problems above due to
Tango having rather much more functionality, thus needing more modules. In
addition we find it important to keep interdependencies low where possible,
leading to some additional modules.

> Oh, and the Phobos libs don't have leading Capitol Letters and oh man I
> don't really like that in Tango.

Ignoring this :)

> On the other foot, things I want from Tango:
> Better threading, the fixed bugs, the text modules, the faster GC, all
> the useful extras like signals and etc are all really handy and useful.
> So in short, "stuff".
> 
> Tangobos is pretty much my answer for now I guess, but I'd prefer a
> proper merge rather than having the two libraries just slapped together
> (okay I'm not trying to be mean here, it's not like Tangobos was a 5
> minute hack and I know that, but you get the point).

I think I addressed this in my other post (the stuff about merging).

> 
> Well, hope that sates some of your curiosity.
> But odds are you probably have questions for some of my answers now. :>

No, I don't think I have :) Thank you very much for your feedback. I'd wish
I didn't have to pull it out of you though ;)

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