Implementing Half Floats in D

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2013-02-02 14:42, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:

> Speaking as a researcher, I've on occasion had cause to call on stuff
> from such "2nd party" libraries, and it's not necessarily a happy
> experience.
>
> A while ago I had cause to call on a package in CRAN, the contributed
> package archive for the R statistical programming language.  It wasn't
> one of the modules that's packaged for Debian et al., so I had to pull
> things in directly from R's own package management and build and install
> locally.
>
> In and of itself, R makes this very easy, but what I wasn't prepared for
> was that in installing the one package I was interested in, it would
> pull in and install dozens of other CRAN packages.  And then, when I
> looked inside the code, actually finding out what it was doing was
> nightmarish, because the module of interest was built on top of several
> other contributions by the same authors. Understanding the code involved
> a massive wild goose chase through all those other contributed modules
> to find what functions were being called and what they did.
>
> I don't know if this is typical of CRAN packages, because I tend to use
> R infrequently, but my strong impression was of code that had been
> built, thrown over the wall and then built on top of without any
> attention to design, integration or performance (when I re-implemented
> the algorithms using Octave/MATLAB they were much faster, and I doubt
> this was down to the superiority of the language or interpreter).
>
> And this code wasn't built by stupid people -- they were very good
> statisticians.  In their defence, I suspect the reason they built
> higgledy-piggledy as they did was because they knew their earlier
> modules _worked_ and reliability was the most important thing for them.
>
> That's the cost of 2nd-party libraries -- they are very hit-and-miss in
> terms of design, sustainability and hence, reliability.
>
> Now, that said, I think a "2nd-party" repository for D could be a great
> project, but what I _wouldn't_ like to see was that repository being
> considered an adequate replacement for carefully designed standard
> library functionality.  One of the things I love about D is precisely
> the breadth of Phobos' support, and it feels like the solution to
> Phobos' problems is a better design and review process rather than
> ringfencing a too-small set of core functionality.
>
> Of course, a 2nd-party repository could be part of the prototyping and
> experimentation behind new standard-library work, just as Boost is for C++.

I can tell you this about Ruby. Its package manager, RubyGems, is one 
its greatest assets.

Just because a library has many dependencies doesn't mean it's badly 
designed. It could just mean that it's flexible and modular.

When Ruby on Rails 3.0 (a web framework for Ruby) was released it had a 
lot more dependencies than Rails 2.0. One reason was it was more modular 
designed. They extracted package that could be used without the rest of 
Rails, like ActiveRecord (database access), ActiveSupport (a general 
utility package) and so on.

Do you rather prefer how most C and C++ library works. They all 
implement everything from scratch. String classes, containers, 
algorithms and so on. Or they bundle a third party library within their 
own library forcing me to use it even though I already have it installed 
out of the box.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg