[dmd-internals] Oldest five bugs

[Alex]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 11:53 PM, David Simcha <dsimcha at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Don Clugston <dclugston at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> More importantly, I think this attention is misplaced.
>> Organizationally, the attention needs to be on Phobos, which, in stark
>> contrast to DMD, has not noticeably benefited from the move to git.
>> Look at the changelogs. There are zillions of compiler fixes, and
>> practically nothing for Phobos.
>> Phobos is not moving. What can we do to improve the situation?
>
>
> One of the biggest things holding back Phobos development is that so many of
> the things that are missing are high-level design issues as much as
> implementation issues.  (For examples see my previous post that touched on
> this:
> http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/2011-November/115320.html).
>
> Implementation and low-level design are a lot more parallelizable than
> high-level design because they can be done on the spur of the moment
> whenever one has a free hour or two.  High-level design tends to require
> long discussions if done collaboratively and/or long blocks of free time to
> hold a lot of stuff in one's head if done alone.  Furthermore, if someone
> just hacks something together and the community doesn't like the high-level
> design, the work will be completely wasted.  This is a deterrent.
>
> This is compounded by the newsgroup not being the best medium to discuss
> design.  Asynchronous communication is good for quick messages.  In-depth
> discussion requires that the people discussing hold a lot of information in
> their head at once.  When a discussion gets too deep on the newsgroup, it
> becomes hard to follow because the amount of context that has to be reloaded
> into one's brain to make sense of the latest post becomes too high.  Maybe
> the core Phobos devs should occasionally use some more synchronous form of
> communication (e.g. Skype meetings, chat, etc.) to hammer out high-level
> design issues.

I think it would be a good idea to utilize IRC. There's already a
rather large D community there, and I'm sure they would be willing to
give their .02 in design discussions.

>
> Lastly, design issues tend to require intimate familiarity with use cases.
> I would have no problem implementing a container library (it's just basic
> data structures) but I don't feel qualified to do the high-level design here
> because I don't understand all the use cases that make it a non-trivial
> problem.  Probably very few people have diverse enough experience to have a
> deep understanding of the tradeoffs involved.
>
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Regards,
Alex