The path to unity

[Don]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Denis Koroskin wrote:
>> Well put, thank you. Everyone finds this situation annoying. That's 
>> the Number One problem of the D (remember "top five" poll?).
>>
>> The problem as I see it is that there is an overlapping functionality 
>> in Phobos and Tango (std.stream.Stream/tango.io.Conduit etc).
>> The solution as I see it to redesign Phobos and Tango by removing dead 
>> (buggy, unsupported) code, separating libraries functionality and 
>> removing duplication.
>>
>> I'd remove from Phobos:
>>
>> std.
>>  openrj
>>  bigint (old one, by Janice)
>>  regexp
>>  socket
>>  xml
>>  much, much more (see more complete list in my previous post[1]).
> 
> These don't work all too well. But there's another issue with the 
> approach you suggest. There's no dialectics. You assume that the above 
> are the last word on the matter uttered by phobos. But things may be 
> rewritten quite a bit for D2. Speaking of your short list above, indeed 
> openrj sucks and should disappear (don't get me started). Bigint should 
> be replaced by Don's implementation. Regexp should be rewritten to use 
> ranges and templatized characters everywhere (you'd be able to read text 
> from stdin using a regexp as a separator... anyone who's tried that 
> knows that's quite a feat). Socket also needs to be rewritten to support 
> ranges. Xml too, in addition to replacing the slow delegates with fast 
> aliases. All of these should use the full power and expressiveness of 
> D2, not transport their old design to it (as they are doing now).

Seriously, if we could drop those (especially, openrj), the situation 
would be considerably improved. Much of the initial driving force for 
the creation of Tango was a feeling that Phobos was a random accretion 
of functionality, including some modules with no justification for 
inclusion in a small standard library.

>> 'druntime' would provide an essential functionality to run D programs 
>> on other platforms: gc, compiler, runtime, etc.
>> std - provide simple and generic functionality, that can be used in 
>> conjunction (unix style): algorithm, range, contracts, math[2], some 
>> helpers/utils, etc.
>> tango - extended functionality: network, io (including console io), 
>> xml, etc
>>
>> Tango would depend on Phobos (which is now *very* tiny) and both 
>> depend on druntime. I believe Tango will greatly benefit from using 
>> contracts, ranges and algorithms, that are absent from it.
> 
> I think that would be great. The way I see things, however, things like 
> ranges percolate through other parts of the library so strongly and so 
> visibly, they are bound to decisively influence a lot more than just 
> implementation internals.

That's for sure. But if Phobos2 were purged, it'd be a lot more 
impressive. Right now it really isn't suitable for building an extended 
library around. But after stripping out the detritus, the statements 
along the lines of "Tango will *never* be based on Phobos" might disappear.

openrj must die.