Phobos 2

[Stanislav Blinov via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 2 June 2017 at 18:43:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> A clean slate is alluring, and there are several things that 
> can be done differently in Phobos, as there are in any project 
> that's been around for a while. It may, however, be difficult 
> to find enough people able and willing to take such a large 
> project off the ground. There are plenty of great things that 
> can be done with the standard library, ranging from the trivial 
> - documentation, fixes of bugs triaged as "trivial" or 
> "bootcamp" etc - to the most creative.

Indeed, the idea is an inviting one. Fixing mistakes of the past 
may be tedious, but it is a good way of moving forward. I don't 
think such a project actually needs a large amount of full-time 
participants: if not any other reason, it is impractical. We 
can't reasonably hope to have experts on everything in an OSS 
project like this, at least not on a day-to-day basis. A small 
core group inviting PRs and perhaps using a voting system for 
accepting/rejecting features should suffice. The biggest 
challenge is to dilute incoming features into most basic forms, 
simple, efficient and reusable components, which may occasionally 
fall out of the collective expertise.
However, it might be prudent to adopt a waiting stance on this, 
and let several key language features to mature (i.e. the current 
DIP queue). The big problem of Phobos is that it grew together 
with the language, often lagging behind in terms of use of 
language features, while still growing the code base, depending 
on obsolete functionality, and making future fixes harder and 
harder. Repeating this will be a huge mistake, and inevitably 
will lead to talks about Phobos 3 in a few years.