Phobos - breaking existing code

[ketmar via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, 28 Nov 2014 17:43:16 -0600
Brad Roberts via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On 11/28/14, 5:39 PM, ketmar via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > oh, wait... such tool was suggested years ago and has no signs of
> > "official blessing" until this year's summer! and now it can't fix
> > two-year-old code.
> 
> I don't understand this attitude.  Don't wait for any sort of gold star rubber stamp ticker tape 
> parade.  If you think something is worth doing, do it.
writing and *supporting* such tool (linter, fixer) which is inevitably
tied to the compiler and stdlib development process is a hard work. the
author of the tool wants to be sure that this tool is "blessed", so he
can interop with other teams. users of such tool wants to be sure that
this is not the "one man work" which can disappear any time when author
becomes bored.

actually, such tool is a part of the compiler suite. that's why it's
very little motivation to do it without "blessing". someone can write
some quickhack tool for himself to fix *his* codebase, but making such
tool usable for others, documenting it and so on is a great amount of
work.

see, i have the tool that fixes my dmd code for gdc. it successfully
processes all my code, 'cause i know my coding habits and can do this
with simple regexps. can this tool be used by someone else, on very
different codebase? i doubt it. can it be fixed to process other
codebases? i doubt it, it doesn't even have the proper parser. do i
motivated to improve it? not at all. "blessing" is a motivation.

like, say, D->C++ translator which i suggested in the thread about
bootstraping D compiler which is written in D. the answer was "no, it's
unlikely to be accepted". do i want to spend alot of my time on the
code that i myself don't need at all, and without any hope that it will
be used later? nope. i have alot of things to code that are interesting
for me.

"blessing" for companion tools is a motivator.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 181 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20141129/81b8a4ef/attachment.sig>