std.getopt suggestion

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 10/5/11 6:53 AM, Regan Heath wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:39:42 +0100, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>> Did it ever prevent you from getting anything done with it?
>
> That's not the question we should be asking. The question we should be
> asking is, will anyone ever want to re-use getopts parser for something
> other than a once off command line parse for a command line application.

I don't think yours is the right question either. This thread has become 
illustrative of a trend that would be great to change course a bit. I 
sustained my position in this thread longer than necessary in an attempt 
to explain this to me and others.

Let me give a little context. This summer there was serious talk about 
using D at Facebook for a project that would last three months in 
development. D fulfilled all requirements, but had problems with library 
availability. For example, I was asked about D's connectivity to OpenSSL 
and MySQL. I told them they can translate the appropriate C headers 
manually or semi-automatically. They looked into it but they gave up 
because they saw this effort as a foreshadow of several other missing 
libraries. The barrier of entry for using OpenSSL or MySQL in Python is 
very low. The project was written in Python.

A friend of mine, startup owner, read TDPL cover to cover and loved it. 
Then he did some more research and spent $7000 on a top-of-the-line 
machine to run his service-based application, written in Python. This is 
because he figured he has a lot of libraries already available for 
Python that will accelerate his productivity, and estimated that for his 
projected load he can compensate the speed difference. "Not everybody is 
Google, Facebook, or Yahoo", he said.

There are other similar stories; these are the most recent I remember. 
We now have the GNU integration to get busy with, and we need a host of 
other APIs that connect us to the world. The right question is, can we 
afford to discuss packing three globals into one struct in std.getopt at 
this time?

Making working code a tad better could go on forever, and might seem 
like progress. But it's not - it's asymptotic progress towards a local 
optimum, while we're looking at a hill of potential ahead.

I kindly suggest anyone with an interest in D's future to focus on 
moving the big rocks. We can worry about the gravel and the sand later.


Thanks,

Andrei