Phobos vs Tango! What's your opinion?

[Bill Baxter]

Daniel Giddings wrote:
> Dlé wrote:
>> Hello people!
>>
>> I'm working and studing this new (for me :-) ) language. I have some 
>> questions and i think your opinion is so precious for me.
>>
>> First, D is a new language.The official library is Phobos. Why another 
>> library how Tango that is not compatible with Phobos? Because Tango is 
>> opensource and the comunity can develop the library?
>>
>> Why not a concept how java for example, where we have only one big 
>> family of class?
>>
>> Fundametals differences between Phobos and Tango?
>>
>> Tank's!
>>
>> I wait your opinions!
>>
>> Dié
>>
> 
> It is rather unfortunate having both. Ideally Tango should be a 
> stand-alone library that is an optional (and useful) extra. [Aside: is 
> it possible to get the incompatible code in some way included in Phobos 
> so they can run alongside happily? - are the incompatibilities in Tango 
> enough to break large portions of Phobos if they were moved to it?]
> 
> They are incompatible however, forcing anyone developing to choose 
> between the two and fragmenting libraries where developers haven't 
> explicitly supported both.

 From what I'm guessing based on what Gregor said, his "Tangobos" will 
be based on Tango, but will allow you from a Tango app to do things like 
"import std.string;"

How he's going about it... I don't know.  I think you pretty much have 
to create a modified copy of the Phobos source tree with all instances 
of toString changed to toUtf8.  Then you need to make a compatibility 
std.gc module that delegates all the heavy lifting to Phobos.  toString 
to toUtf8 should be pretty easy to automate with sed/perl/std.regex. 
The std.gc stuff used in phobos looks pretty minimal.  Just 
file.d,outbuffer.d,stdio.d, and zlib.d seem to call the gc directly.

Although toString is also a standalone function in addition to being a 
method on Phobos' object.  So I guess that makes it a little trickier to 
translate.

Oh, and there are exceptions to deal with too.  And probably a few more 
things I haven't thought of but Gregor is knee-deep in trying to get 
working.

--bb