Right after allocators: containers or database connectivity?

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

My work on allocators takes the last turn before the straight line. I've 
arranged with Dicebot to overlap the review period with finalizing 
details so I can act on feedback quickly.

After that I'm ready for some major library work, and I had two things 
in mind.

One would be a good pass of std.container, in particular (a) a design 
review with the DbI glasses on; (b) better documentation - sadly it 
seems to me so inadequate as to make containers themselves unusable; (c) 
investigate use of UFCS - std.container's design predates UFCS yet is a 
perfect fit for it, and most likely other cool language improvements 
we've added since.

The other would be database connectivity. Erik Smith has shown some cool 
ideas at DConf, and I encourage him to continue working on them, but it 
seems to me this is an area where more angles mean more connectivity 
options.

For database connectivity I'm thinking of using ODBC. What I see is that 
on all major platforms, vendors offer mature, good quality ODBC drivers, 
and most programs that have anything to do with databases offer ODBC 
connectivity. So connecting with ODBC means the individual database 
drivers are already there; no need to waste effort on creating drivers 
for each (or asking vendors to, which we can't afford).

So I gave myself ten minutes the other night just before I went to sleep 
to see if I can get an ODBC rig on my OSX machine starting from 
absolutely nothing. I got http://www.odbcmanager.net but then got 
confused about where to find some dumb driver (text, csv) and gave up.

Last night I gave myself another ten minutes, and lo and behold I got up 
and running. Got a demo CSV driver from 
http://www.actualtech.com/product_access.php (which also supports Access 
and others). Then I headed to 
http://www.easysoft.com/developer/languages/c/odbc_tutorial.html and was 
able to run a simple ODBC application that lists the available drivers. 
Nice!

It's trivial work to convert the C headers to D declarations. Then it's 
straight library design to offer convenient libraries on top of the 
comprehensive but pedestrian ODBC C API. Then, voilà - we'll have 
database connectivity for all databases out there!

Please help me choose what to work on next.


Andrei