Right after allocators: containers or database connectivity?

[Kiith-Sa via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 9 June 2015 at 17:05:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
> 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

Containers.

But - we really need those allocators working in actual released
Phobos first.