D is our last hope

[Adam D Ruppe]

On Thursday, 21 December 2023 at 15:19:27 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote:
> Phobos had a big inrush of development many years ago, but 
> since then it has been a trickle, leaving wide gaps in 
> functionality and questionable design that everyone agrees 
> should be changed, yet it remains entrenched. Sure, some nice 
> things are added, some bugs fixed, but they are few and far 
> between. Is this because of a lack of people power? No! There's 
> lots of people willing, some even *eager* to contribute to 
> Phobos, but they are instead turned away

I pulled some historical information today. The phobos rush of 
development around 2010 was the outlier; the rest of its life has 
been similar - slow and virtually closed.

You might have heard of the old stdlib wars; Tango vs Phobos. 
Care to guess how this started? 2004 - D was very young - and 
substantial parts of the community felt that Phobos "wasn't 
moving in any direction, useful features were missing and no one 
could easily provide code (or didn't feel as though they 
could)"[1] (this quote was written in November 2008, exact author 
unknown), so Sean Kelly, et.al., created a project later called 
"Ares" with a key goal of "produc[ing] a fully functional 
standard library for D" with a very important note that 
differentiated it from Phobos: "The Ares project will gladly 
accept all submissions for review and/or inclusion. Contributors 
are encouraged to respond to any community feedback and re-submit 
any changes or improvements they deem appropriate." [2] (that 
summary written in Sept 2005)

As one contemporaneous account summarized working with upstream: 
"Walter blesses many ideas. What I'm wondering is how quickly he 
incorporates the results." and citing, as a downside of an 
upstart competitor (which btw ive never heard of until now): "and 
it's still dependent on Walter, as it usually is." [3] (Sept 2004)

In 2006, a new user asked about the library situation. The 
answer: "Ares is also likely to be the staging point for other 
low-level enhancements by the community; last I checked, Sean was 
faster at responding to library contributions than Walter." [4]

It is worth noting that in Oct 2008, after being eviscerated in 
the press over having "two standard libraries", upstream FINALLY 
relented and merged parts of Ares (then known better as a major 
component of the Tango library) upstream as "druntime" in 2.020. 
[5]

But, despite some positive changes and some exciting periods of 
development, many of those 18 year old posts could just as well 
be posted today.

1: http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?StandardLib
2: http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=990
3: http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=342
4: http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1873
5: http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4229