Two standard libraries?

[Bill Baxter]

Steve Teale wrote:
> It bothers me that Phobos and Tango seem to be completely divergent.
> One of the things that makes a language successful is that it has a
> good standard library.  It seems that with D, you have to be a
> betting man - which standard library will prevail.

I think the only issue is the fact that they're incompatible.  Maybe 
that's what you meant by 'divergent', but to me 'divergent' just means 
going in different directions, as in creating diversity.  The existence 
of a big Java-style library like Tango can only be seen as a plus for D, 
except for that darn incompatibility issue.

Tango could have been made compatible with phobos.  The reasons for 
making it a replacement for phobos rather than a regular library are (as 
I understand it):
1) They wanted to be in charge of their own garbage collector
2) Phobos' exception hierarchy makes no sense and they wanted to fix that.

And there were a few other minor things that annoyed them about Phobos, 
but by themselves I suspect wouldn't have been enough to warrant 
creating a schism.  (printf declared in object.d, toString actually 
returning utf-8 not just any old string).

It would be great if at the D conference the Tango folks could sit down 
and have a serious face-to-face with Walter about what it would take to 
make Tango D-compatible once again -- or perhaps that should be 
upgrading D to be Tango-compatible.  I'm thinking things like getting 
Walter to fix the exception hierarchy in Phobos, and maybe doing 
whatever it takes to make the garbage collector pluggable to allow 
experimentation in that area without creating a schism.

--bb