Implementing Half Floats in D

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 2/2/13 11:50 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> I can tell you this about Ruby. Its package manager, RubyGems, is one
> its greatest assets.
>
> Just because a library has many dependencies doesn't mean it's badly
> designed. It could just mean that it's flexible and modular.
>
> When Ruby on Rails 3.0 (a web framework for Ruby) was released it had a
> lot more dependencies than Rails 2.0. One reason was it was more modular
> designed. They extracted package that could be used without the rest of
> Rails, like ActiveRecord (database access), ActiveSupport (a general
> utility package) and so on.
>
> Do you rather prefer how most C and C++ library works. They all
> implement everything from scratch. String classes, containers,
> algorithms and so on. Or they bundle a third party library within their
> own library forcing me to use it even though I already have it installed
> out of the box.

I agree with all of the above. While knowing very little about design of 
package managers, I really appreciate using such (either at Facebook or 
for other languages).

It would be really meaningful to the future of D if a strongly motivated 
expert in package management would want to propose what it takes to get 
us where we should be in that regard.

As a simple question - what would be an existing design that would be 
most appropriate for us to take inspiration from?


Andrei