A Few thoughts on C, C++, and D

[Wulfklaue via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 30 May 2017 at 07:15:08 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> Others have mentioned widening D's appeal by widening the 
> number of C APIs there are wrappers for. This is a good idea, I 
> agree – in my case libdvbv5 and librtlsdr are the beasties of 
> interest. I argue Deimos is the wrong direction since it is 
> about manually managing evolving API, DStep is the right 
> direction since it is about creating the API of the moment. 
> However DStep may not yet be ready. I need to tinker more. 
> libdvbv5 effectively includes the whole Linux DVB API, there 
> are a lot of C header files. It's alla question of how best to 
> do the wrapping.

The problem is, that wrappers alone is not the solution. Lets say 
i write a wrapper, have no more time and abandon the project. 
Later people see these half finished and not maintain wrapper ( 
and others ). How does this reflect on the language itself.

Its been my firm believe that lose packages are a detriment to a 
language. There is no controle over the quality of the work and 
yet the use of those third party packages can have a impact on 
the language perception ( unsupported, badly written, licencing 
issues ).

Half baked solutions are no solutions. Packages need to be part 
of the language standard or "extended" library. Having the 
ownership under the language. Allowing people who are 
dissatisfied to grieve there bugs or issues, directly to the 
language maintainers. It also adds oversight to the packages.

You mention Debian and look how they manage there packages. Code 
has issue: Rejected. Not maintained: Rejected. Licencing issues: 
Rejected.

Simply trowing wrappers around C libraries does not make a 
language more interesting. Quality, standardization, one 
location, supported, ... those are the keywords.

One can simply look at Go. 100.000 packages, 98% are junk, 
unfinished, not maintained, etc. And people are forced to dive 
into the junk to find the good ones. Its the same with other 
languages and there unenforced third party packages.

This applies to enterprise users and normal users, everybody 
wants to have the quality and security that packages are 
maintained, have a standard, have the same API structure, ...

But this requires a lot of coordination and manpower. Frankly, i 
do not see this happening any time soon in D ( and other 
languages ) that work with volunteers.