Expanding Phobos from a flat hierachy

[Don]

On Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at 08:16:38 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, February 06, 2013 08:56:26 Don wrote:
>> In the "Implementing Half Floats in D" thread, we seemed to 
>> have
>> reached a consensus on two important points:
>> (a) Phobos should have a broad scope (rather than being small
>> like the C standard library).
>> (b) The current flat structure of Phobos (every module in the
>> root) does not scale to hundreds of modules.
>> 
>> It's not quite unanimous on (a), but seems to be close enough.
>> 
>> Together, (a) and (b) mean we need a plan. The sooner we can do
>> it, the less painful it will be. But, on the other hand, it's
>> something that we really don't want to get wrong.
>> 
>> Personal taste plays a huge role in this (Practically any
>> structure can work, but we're looking for an arrangement which 
>> is
>> intuitive and aesthetically pleasing to as many people as
>> possible). It'll be most productive to stick to uncontroversial
>> facts as long as possible.

> You can also argue endlessly about what should be where in
> the hierarchy, which is needless bikeshedding.

Yes, exactly. That's why I want to defer passing judgement on 
anything until we have a reasonable set of data. Just because a 
design works well for a particular language doesn't mean it would 
also be good for D, but it's still good to look at.

I think it's more constructive to say "that design was tried in 
Ruby, but they abandoned it" than to say "I personally don't like 
it". OTOH, if three different languages have totally different 
structures, and all have been widely praised, then it's clear 
it's a personal preference issue.

And if we can say, "all nine libraries we've looked at did it 
this way", then the argument to do the same thing is very strong.