maintenance

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 9/16/20 10:16 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 9/15/20 8:27 PM, James Blachly wrote:
>> On 9/15/20 1:38 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Looks like there's a fair amount of opportunity to improving code in 
>>> phobos in ways that reduce its complexity and size, and also make it 
>>> more robust without breaking backwards compatibility. I just took 
>>> std.algorithm.comparison because it kinda was the first 
>>> alphabetically, and there's some good red here: 
>>> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/7635/. Would be great if others 
>>> joined!
>>
>> Andrei,
>>
>> Thanks for doing this often thankless work. I benefit every day from 
>> your and others' work on Phobos

Seconded!

> 
> Actually it's quite satisfying in a relaxing kind of way. Like putting 
> tools in order in the shop. Also it's important; I recall people 
> recommended here that beginners look at phobos' source for how to write 
> idiomatic D. I'd definitely want them to look at good code.
> 

It's also instructive to see what *even the language maintainers* have 
to do to workaround limitations of the language.

If there are things in Phobos that look way more complex than they 
should be (you have a couple of good examples in your "Goofy code" 
thread), then it might be a signal that we can do better with the 
features the language provides.

As I said in my talk last year -- D's introspection and code generation 
capabilities are the crown jewel of D. We should do everything possible 
to improve the situation for those types of tasks.

-Steve