DIP11: Automatic downloading of libraries

[Byakkun]

On Tue, 21 Jun 2011 21:01:07 +0300, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:

> On 2011-06-21 19:36, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On 2011-06-21 10:17, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>> Maybe I was a bit too harsh saying that std.benchmark maybe wasn't  
>>> worth
>>> adding. On the other hand isn't this what the review process is about
>>> (or maybe this is before the review process)? We can't include
>>> EVERYTHING in Phobos or it will become like the Java/C# standard
>>> library, I assume we don't want that.
>>
>> Why not? Granted, we want quality code, and we only have so many people
>> working on Phobos and only so many people to help vet code, but  
>> assuming that
>> it can be written at the appropriate level of quality and that the
>> functionality is generally useful, I don't see why we wouldn't want a  
>> large
>> standard library like Java and C# have. Given our level of manpower, I  
>> don't
>> expect that we'll ever have a standard library that large, but I don't  
>> see why
>> having a large standard library would be a bad thing as long as it's of  
>> high
>> quality and its functionality is generally useful.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> I just got that impression. That we want a relative small standard  
> library and have other libraries available as well.
>

I see only one perspective from which you would like to not have
standard libs as large as C# an Java provided the quality of the code is
good and that is the fact that you can't realistically hope to have the
IDEs they have which integrate facilities to access the documentation very
easily or one can just to rely on auto-completion (which also gives Java
and C# the luxury to use very very explicit and strait forward naming).
This is worthy of consideration for phobos (the fact
that it doesn't come bundled with an IDE like C#). Otherwise it is good
to have as much std as possible and useful. My only concern (excepting
bugs and holes in Phobos) is that the packages are not grouped at all
and that increases the time (at least for a noob) it take to search
through the documentation and the code. Also there is some ambiguity to
regarding the place of some functionality like std.array and std.string
(I fond myself surprised in other areas but I can't remember right now)
which I imagine it could be fixed simply by intelligently using D module
system. But maybe there are reasons for doing it this way which I don't
get.
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