A few holes (imho) in the ecosystem of libraries

[Andrew]

On Monday, 15 May 2023 at 13:04:57 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> 2. A I/O abstraction really suitable for parsing/emitting

Regarding your second point, I noticed this was limiting me 
recently, so I've been working in the evenings on a 
proof-of-concept for what this could look like if added to Phobos 
in the same style as ranges: 
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/okoaghstghyxapqcwbtr@forum.dlang.org

My implementation of course allows for input and output streams 
of any type, but does offer quite a few extras for specifically 
`ubyte` streams, and in my opinion, it's a much simpler, more 
opaque interface that'll be easier for programmers to grasp. To 
anyone reading, I'd appreciate if you could spare some time to 
check it out and provide feedback in that thread.

> What do YOU think is missing in the library department?

We're missing a lot of "one solution" libraries; which is that 
there are many small libraries that probably do most of what you 
want, but we don't have any large libraries backed by open source 
communities that offer a production-quality experience, like how 
Java has so many Apache projects under it. Some concrete examples 
might be:
- A common interface for HTTP request sending and receiving. It 
would be great if D had a single unifying interface for dealing 
with HTTP in particular, as it's pretty much the most common form 
of traffic for user-facing apps nowadays. Something like Java's 
Servlets.
- A single most-popular UI framework. Most other languages have 
identified and "chosen" a single UI framework to be the "one" 
that pretty much any UI is created with.
- An out-of-the-box crypto library. Botan is getting close, but 
we really need better documentation on that.
- And finally, better documentation! I don't mean any offense, 
but ddoc is quite ugly compared to the documentation that modern 
javascript and python projects have, and even javadoc is easier 
to read than ddoc, in my opinion.

Oh, and one other thing I noticed was a lack of an up-to-date 
coverage parser and analyzer library, so I wrote my own script 
for that recently. But maybe I should make something for that.