RFC: std.uuid

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/22/11 5:38 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 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.

Agreed. I think it would be wonderful to achieve ragel capabilities with 
compile-time execution. If we need ragel in D we've failed.

Andrei