how to build up the library..

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 10/6/11 10:27 AM, Steve Teale wrote:
> Andrei,
>
> Are there guidelines for the Phobos process?

We follow the Boost review process: 
http://www.boost.org/community/reviews.html

> I have put a fair amount of work, two years ago and recently, into a piece for
> accessing MySQL via D. I'm looking at this as a bottom-up investigation into what
> might be a more generalized interface for database access.
>
> I've got to the point where I can support a good range of database operations, and
> present result sets as arrays of D structs, which presumably implies Ranges.
> There's also lower level stuff to do more complex operations. So I'm wondering if
> I should take the first process steps. I'm retired, so I do have time to spend on it.
>
> The MySQL C api is not what you could call orthogonal - in crystallography terms
> it is probably Triclinic, so it may not have been the best place to start. There's
> another guy I've had some correspondence with who is working on Postgres. He's
> interested in the same idea.
>
> What do you think?

I think this is a great initiative. Perhaps it would be nice to have a 
C-level API translation in etc.mysql. Then we should have a driver-style 
interface a la Java's JDBC, Perl's DBI, Python's PEP249 etc.

For D in particular, I think the range aspect is secondary. Probably it 
will be more important to interoperate with Variant. Most APIs store 
columns in a Variant structure that captures all possible types of the 
database.

Resultsets come as input ranges of array of Variant. It's not important 
to make them compatible with the input range interface because it's 
unlikely you'll pass that array of Variant directly to some algorithm. 
That being said, people will naturally expect to use the canonical range 
interface. It would probably be gratuitous to choose other primitive(s) 
than empty/front/popFront.

Making the database interface generic over other SQL databases will 
probably be considerable more work, and will need study of existing APIs 
and input from the community.


Thanks,

Andrei