The XML module in Phobos

[Lutger]

language_fan wrote:

> Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:38:36 -0400, Adam D. Ruppe thusly wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:23:50PM -0300, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>>> But *why* use or make another one when the Tango one is already
>>> excellent? :(
>> 
>> Copyright.
> 
> There are most likely several issues that prevent the reuse of that code.
> First, the indentation, module boundaries, and naming conventions may
> differ (tabs vs spaces, 4 vs 8 spaces, camelCase vs foo_bar etc.).

Naming conventions by Tango is quite similar to the style guidelines that 
Walter Bright has written, probably closer than phobos. As for formatting, 
you know, there are tools for that and descent even has the best formatter 
ever.
 
> Next, does it use the slow object oriented approach like the rest of
> Tango (and unlike Phobos, which uses a very lightweight procedural
> model). Are there any benchmark results that show the approach Tango uses
> is any good, i.e. more performant than the ones for Java and C++ (even
> with larger xml documents). If it is, then the idea can be copied to
> Phobos as well.

Object-oriented does not mean slow. Tango's XML library outperforms the 
fastest C++ libraries, here are some benchmarks:
http://dotnot.org/blog/archives/2008/03/10/xml-benchmarks-updated-graphs-
with-rapidxml/ 
 
> Finally, the copyright is a problem unless it is handed over to
> digitalmars. Otherwise it might get troublesome to sell D later for
> commercial use when Phobos becomes the Standard library for D 2.0.

I don't think (and hope) that walter bright & co will sell the standard 
library commercially, if that's even possible with current copyright owners.  
All that is needed is a license Walter Bright can live with, such as the 
boost one. 

Seems like an excellent opportunity for leveraging open source, no?