Does D have too many features?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, May 08, 2012 14:17:14 Sean Kelly wrote:
> On May 8, 2012, at 9:35 AM, foobar wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 8 May 2012 at 14:59:43 UTC, Lars T. Kyllingstad wrote:
> >> On Tuesday, 8 May 2012 at 14:48:27 UTC, foobar wrote:
> >>> [...], what if I find it useful to use e.g. FORTRAN code, should the
> >>> relevant functions also be in the stdlib?>> 
> >> No, FORTRAN has absolutely nothing to do with D. C, on the other hand,
> >> does. Both druntime and Phobos depend heavily on the C stdlib. The GC
> >> uses malloc/free, std.stdio.File is a wrapper around FILE*, etc.> 
> > Irrelevant. For all I care druntime could be implemented in Klingon. That
> > doesn't mean its API needs to include Klingon as well. That's called
> > "encapsulation".
> This is difficult to do with the module system. You'd have to hand-craft
> .di files with the stdc headers left out to avoid bundling them in the
> distro. They could go into core.internal I suppose though.

We've previously discussed having _all_ of the C system call functions from 
the various OSes that we support being in druntime, and I very much think that 
that's the right way to go. Phobos and druntime then have whatever they need 
as for as standard C and system call functions go, and anyone who needs any 
which aren't wrapped by Phobos in some manner has them available to them. 
Anyone that doesn't want to use any of those C function directly, doesn't have 
to, but I don't see any reason to hide them just because someone doesn't want 
to use them in their code.

If the problem is that certain C functions end up getting used a lot when they 
should have D wrappers of some kind which better encapsulate their 
functionality, then maybe we add the appropriate wrappers to Phobos. But 
that's a completely different issue. Hiding the C functions doesn't help us 
any.

It makes sense to make truly internal stuff internal, but the standard C
function declarations and OS system functions are _not_ internal to druntime.
They're _very_ much external. druntime is just providing them because they're
functionality which is core to the system that any D program is running on.

- Jonathan M Davis