D: A language without focus

[Anders F Björklund]

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:

> I like these ideas (it is not as if they haven't been suggested before), but
> I agree with Anders in that the BRL part of it is mostly there, he suggests
> Phobos, I think Ares got it even clearer, although it is not as complete
> yet.

Actually I said Phobos/Ares I think ? I'm not sure if there's any reason
to use both at once, I think Ares is a community replacement for Phobos.

There is also "gphobos", the GNU Phobos which differs from the DM Phobos 
in the same way that the GNU D Compiler differs from the DM D Compiler.

> As for the ERL, I think that will be much more difficult to get right,
> although it would be nice to have a "standard" that could be shipped with
> the compiler. Walter already has suggested to have a standard GUI, and
> other packages might follow. I guess if we as a community actually can
> agree on a setup, he might include it all.

I'd rather have the "standard" libraries small and working, than large
and broken, if I had to choose between the lesser of the two evils...

Because you can always add a library later on, but it's *hard* to work
against a broken standard library (like with the recls and phobos bugs)


If it's all supported and tested (like Java - but preferrably open too)
then having a big library is good. If not, I'd prefer the C approach...

i.e. have a small runtime, and add any of the others as you see fit

> The reason I think it might be difficult, is because D in itself gives us
> many more possibilities than VM based languages such as Java and C#, and
> because we might care even more about speed, we probably will pick and
> choose the right library for us even more than others do, similar to what
> happens in the C/C++ world.

Seeing as how D gives you three string types, I would say you are right.
;-)

> Oh, and AFAIK, an effort to make a Qt inspired library in D has just been
> started :D Just to give is just a tiny bit more choice ;) Or possibly
> because someone got tired of hearing about how good Qt is and why it should
> be ported to D...

There's a lot of nice things done in Qt, only downside is their dual 
license (GPL/commercial) which I find less flexible than the others.

--anders