Does D have too many features?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 10:07:54PM +0200, q66 wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:04:11 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> >On 4/28/2012 1:00 PM, bearophile wrote:
> >>"Phobos is too fat"
> >
> >As opposed to Phobos being phat?
> 
> Well my concern is so that it doesn't end up like Python standard
> library, half-bitrotting and half-crap :) Huge standard library is
> not a good idea even for a very big language/library team, and D
> doesn't have one.

On the contrary, being able to do stuff without having to reinvent the
square wheel every single time is a big plus.

I used to have a strong NIH attitude -- years ago during my DOS days, I
reimplemented video output routines in assembly because I wanted to use
protected mode in DOS. Nothing in the C standard library worked because
they are all tied to DOS or otherwise do stuff that breaks in protected
mode. So I reinvented file abstractions, string processing, etc., in my
own library. I was rather proud of it too: my video routines took
advantage of features of my particular chosen video mode, so I could use
the i386's built-in loop instructions and other such things to output
characters really fast.

In retrospect, it was a fun and very educational experience. But to be
frank, you can only reinvent the C standard library so many times before
you get totally sick and tired of it. I mean, I've implemented linked
lists, hand-made lexers, parsers, etc., who knows how many times, and
nowadays the thought of having to do it all over again just makes me
feel, "I should be doing better things with my time".

The whole point of a standard library is that if somebody has written
that code before, and it's general enough for everyday use, then you
shouldn't need to download this, install that, configure the other,
before you can use it. It's a major plus if you're publishing code to be
able to say, just download my sources and compile it with the language
standard library and it will all work. As opposed to, if you want to
compile my code, you need library X and Y which depend on W and Z, all
of which have to be downloaded from different places all over the 'net
and you better make sure you get the right versions otherwise everything
will break.

Besides, the whole point of a library is that only what you need is
actually linked in. You don't walk around carrying every book from your
bookshelf just because you *might* need to refer to one of them on some
rare occasion. But the library itself doesn't need to be minimal, in
fact, rather to the contrary. (That's why it's called a "library".)


T

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