Why Phobos is cool

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 6/25/20 10:27 AM, Petar Kirov [ZombineDev] wrote:
> The way I see things is that we as a community need to focus on a 
> vetted, well shaped collection of libraries.
> We need to have process where third-party libraries are able to gain 
> broader support and join dlang-community. Also we need dlang-community 
> to have a healthy number of people who actually maintain the code.
> We need the leadership to realize that investing just in dmd, druntime 
> and phobos is necessary, but very insufficient.
> W&A need to stop pretending that Dub doesn't exist. I feel that unless 
> we embrace using code.dlang.org as method of distribution of everything 
> that's currently part of the compiler archive, Dub's limitations will 
> never be addressed and from that the broader community will suffer.

(By the way just to clarify "A" in "W&A" would stand for Atila. I'm 
commenting as just one in the community.)

I'm a bit confused by this argument. So there is the compiler and 
standard library, and then there's a community-supported library, which 
includes a copy of the standard library under an improved versioning 
schema. It's all legal and encouraged by the generous licensing of the 
compiler and standard library, both of which Walter and I fought hard in 
the past to obtain and maintain.

Dub is the perfect place where community leadership can set the tone and 
organized things as they need to without heavy-handed intervention from 
above. Several people have criticized "the leadership" for not doing 
things the way they wanted, so it seems perplexing that leadership 
intervention is now asked for. What's that nonsense with "pretending dub 
doesn't exist"? So now they need to take ownership of the 
community-driven dub as well? Isn't that a bit too much work for a 
handful of folks in the best of times?

Is money that's been asked for? We don't have enough to do competitive 
hiring.

I don't think Bjarne or Herb have ever been accused of not contributing 
to Boost (which they didn't), or asked to invest in it. Boost has been a 
community-led effort which has had a great influence on C++ development 
- with the participation of volunteers, not the formal standards committee.

>> Anyway, if we can, we try to stick with Phobos, as long as we don't 
>> have a particular problem to solve that needs an external library: 
>> recent example, Martin std.io or SumType instead of std.variant ...
> 
> See, some of the problems in Phobos already have a good solution. The 
> problem that we need to address is the trust.
> The more high-quality and well-maintained libraries there are, the less 
> cautious one would need to be before reaching to code.dlang.org.

This is and will always be the case, and it's normal. A standard library 
can't implement all special purpose libraries, or even a significant 
fraction. A community-led library is a great thing.