Oh Dear

[Michiel Helvensteijn]

bearophile wrote:

>>D2 should be stabilized<
> 
> That will happen in time, but rushing things is very bad. There are some
> other things to be fixed/done first, like: - concurrency;
> - making D2 fitter for the LLVM back-end;
> - fixing the import semantics;
> - improving arrays and slices;
> - improving operator overloading;
> - maybe improving matrices and slices;
> - maybe improving the data parallelism.
> Plus a lot of smaller details to fix, add or improve. I have surely missed
> something.

I believe that what D really needs is a complete formal specification of the
language grammar and semantics. Last I heard, there wasn't any.

Just my two cents.

>>there should be one standard library,<
> 
> I don't agree, I'd like to have both Phobos and Tango at the same time,
> and useful for different purposes, like I have both STL and Boost (among
> other things, like Qt) installed with the C++ compiler.

There would seem to be a difference. Boost was designed to complement the
STL. Boost does not offer features that the STL already possesses.

As I understand it, Tango and Phobos both try to be the one and only D
standard library. Perhaps if the two teams sat down together, they could
design one terrific library. But who has the time?

I agree with the Qt analogy. I use it for designing GUIs. But it annoys me
greatly that they try to reinvent every functionality that's already in the
STL. QString, QList, QEverything. There was simply no need.

Disclaimer: My information on the D specification and Tango/Phobos may be
out of date. I haven't actually programmed in D for years. I mostly lurk in
the newsgroup to read the language design discussions.

-- 
Michiel Helvensteijn