std.serialization: pre-voting review / discussion

[David Nadlinger]

On Saturday, 17 August 2013 at 08:29:37 UTC, glycerine wrote:
> On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 13:43:50 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 13:28:42 UTC, glycerine wrote:
>>> Wishful thinking aside, they are competitors.
>>
>> They are not. `std.serialization` does not and should not 
>> compete in Thrift domain.
>
> Huh? Do you know what thrift does? Summary: Everything that
> Orange/std.serialization does and more.

That's actually not true. Thrift does not serialize arbitrary 
object graphs, or any types with indirections, for that matter. 
This is by design, it would be hard to do this efficiently in all 
target languages, and contrary to Orange, performance is the main 
focus of Thrift.

> If you
> are going to standardize something, standardize the Thrift
> bindings so that the compiler doesn't introduce regressions
> that break them, like happened from dmd 2.062 - present.

On a related note, we desperately need to do something about 
this, especially since there seems to be an increased amount of 
interest in Thrift lately. For 2.061 and the previous releases, I 
always tested every beta against Thrift, and almost invariably 
found at least one bug/regression per release. However, for 2.062 
and 2.063, I was busy with LDC (and other things) at the time and 
it seems like I forgot to run the tests.

The DMD 2.062+ error message (see 
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-2130) doesn't make 
much sense; I guess the best way of going about this would be to 
try to DustMite-reduce the problem first or to fire up DMD in gdb 
to see what exactly is tripping the recursive alias error.

David