Library Development: What to finish/flesh out?

[Lars T. Kyllingstad]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:33:10 +0000, dsimcha wrote:

> I've accumulated a bunch of little libraries via various evening and
> weekend hacking projects over the past year or so, in various states of
> completion. Most are things I'm at least half-considering for Phobos,
> though some belong as third-party libs.  I definitely don't have time to
> finish/flesh out all of them anytime soon, so I've decided to ask the
> community what to prioritize. Below is a summary of everything I've been
> working on, with its current level of completion.  Please let me know
> the following:
> 
> 1.  A relative ordering of how useful you think these libraries would be
> to the community.

In order:

 1. TempAlloc
 2. Matrix ops (I'm biased here, of course...)
 3. RandAA
 4. CSV parser
 5. Rational

That said, it does make sense to start with the things which require the 
least amount of work.  If it would take you half an hour to complete the 
rationals lib, for instance, that may be a good starting point.

Regarding std.mixins, I have to agree with Andrei and the others that 
code should be organised by functionality and not implementation method.

Having thought some more about it, I also think std.file is not the right 
place for GZip support.  Phobos needs an std.compression package/module, 
and a method for bulk reading/writing of gzip files may well be a good 
start.

Finally, I know next to nothing about machine learning, so I won't 
express any opinion about it.


> 2.  In absolute terms, would you find this useful?

Absolutely!

 
> 3.  For the Phobos candidates, whether they're general enough to belong
> in the **standard** library.

I agree with Don that TempAlloc is a candidate for druntime.  Other than 
that, yes.

I note that others have suggested that the matrix stuff go into Phobos.  
As long as it depends on BLAS, I would say that's out of the question.

-Lars