RFC: std.uuid

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Thursday, 22 December 2011 at 23:30:06 UTC, Johannes Pfau 
wrote:
> Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, 22 December 2011 at 23:12:07 UTC, Johannes Pfau
>> wrote:
>>> There's one special thing about this module: It uses the ragel
>>> (http://www.complang.org/ragel/) state machine compiler. I 
>>> hope
>>> this is not a problem for phobos, ragel doesn't introduce any
>>> runtime dependencies and has no effect on licensing. There's
>>> also no need to integrate ragel in the build process. We can
>>> publish a pregenerated .d file, which should be updated
>>> manually whenever changes to uuid.rl are made.
>> 
>> Would it be hard to reimplement the ragel part using string
>> mixins? From a quick glance at it, it doesn't seem too 
>> difficult.
>
> It wouldn't be too difficult. Ragel is only used to parse the 
> text form of uuids. As that's a pretty simple task, such a 
> parser could be written manually.
>
> But I also have a almost complete HTTP header parser/formatter 
> implementation using ragel which I wanted to propose for phobos 
> eventually. And I'm not going to rewrite those, so I hoped 
> std.uuid could clear the way for ragel based code in phobos ;-)

Using 3rd-party technology such as source preprocessors makes 
future contributions more difficult for the vast majority. 
Considering that the language provides nearly the same thing as a 
fully-supported feature, it seems like a redundant complication. 
Parsing/formatting HTTP headers isn't exactly rocket-science, 
either.