Polishing D - suggestions and comments

[Jarrod]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:52:19 -0500, Daniel wrote:

> Walter is, and ought to be, focusing his efforts on the language more
> than the libraries.
> 
> Oddly, I would argue that all libraries are simply stop-gap fixes for
> missing or poorly implemented language features; indeed most programming
> code tends to be.
> 
> However, D has phobos, there was mango, now tango, and work has been
> done on a tangobos.  The fact that the library keeps changing shows that
> D's language features actually have an impact, as they frequently
> replace or integrate library features.
> 
> Regards,
> Dan

To claim Phobos is not a part of D is to claim the C stdlib is not a part 
of C. 
Phobos is a part of D, and it's a very important part of D too (hell we 
can't even have classes without Object.d). Walter is the father of Phobos 
and although he allows others to contribute to it, he is the one who 
decides what to add to Phobos and how to add it. Yes, Walter should focus 
on developing the language of course, but he also has to decide what the 
*standard* library is going to be since he is after all the head project 
manager of both Phobos and D.
I emphasize the word *standard* because right now, we don't have a 
standard. Unless you include a bunch of versioning/mixin hacks, we 
currently have code that won't even compile on different workstations 
because of two very different core libraries that are totally 
incompatible. So now we're stuck with an annoying rift.
Tangobos is a step in the right direction to get compatibility back, but 
at the moment it's just a band-aid solution.

All I want to see is a standard, be it Phobos with all the cool stuff 
Tango adds, or a Tango with all the nice things Phobos has. But this 
isn't going to happen unless one of the dev teams concedes already :|