SQLite Bindings

[dsimcha]

On 3/13/2011 5:56 PM, Jonas Drewsen wrote:
> It's a great idea. But I think there need to be some kind of janitor for
> the 'etc' modules so that it does not end up as a new dsource collection
> of many unmaintained, some dead and a few live projects.

I don't see why this is a concern.  This is what I have in mind:

1.  There are a lot of good C libraries out there, some of which are 
generally useful enough to be in a standard library and are license 
compatible with Phobos.  My thoughts are that we would only include very 
stable C libs that are unlikely to require significant maintenance 
effort.  My personal short list is libcurl (looks like it's already 
happening), SQLite, libpng, and, if we can get a binary attribution 
clause waiver, libbzip2.

2.  The hassle of compiling the C code, translating the header, etc. is 
a significant and annoying transaction cost that probably deters people 
from writing good D wrappers and leads to lots of duplication of effort 
among people who are kinda sorta considering writing one.

3.  Even if someone doesn't intend to write a wrapper initially, they 
may start using the C API directly and eventually end up refactoring out 
a good wrapper from the project that uses the C API.  This is more 
likely if the C API is already there, waiting to be used.

4.  Even if a D wrapper is not written for a long time, having the plain 
C API available for those that want to use it is substantially better 
than nothing, and the C API will not go away once a D wrapper is written.