More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/4/14, 11:16 PM, Arlen wrote:
> A couple years ago I submitted std.rational, but it didn't go
> anywhere.  About a year later I discovered that someone else had
> done a similar thing, but it never made it into Phobos either.
> Of course, it's not because we didn't belong to some "inner
> circle", but I think it has to do with the fact that D has a very
> poor development process.  The point being, something as simple
> as a Rational library shouldn't take years for it to become part
> of Phobos, specially when people are taking the time to do the
> work.

I looked into this (not sure to what extent it's representative of a 
pattern), and probably we could and should fix it. Looks like back in 
2012 you've done the right things (http://goo.gl/kbYQJM) but for 
whatever reason there was not enough response from the community.

Later on, Joseph Rushton Wakeling tried (http://goo.gl/XyQu3D) to put 
std.rational through the review process but things got stuck at 
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/1616 with support 
of traits by BigInt.

I think the "needs to support BigInt" argument is not a blocker - we can 
release std.rational to only support built-in integers, and then adjust 
things later to expand support while keeping backward compatibility. I 
do think it's important that BigInt supports appropriate traits to be 
recognized as an integral-like type.

If you, Joseph, or both would want to put std.rational again through the 
review process I think it should get a fair shake. I do agree that a lot 
of persistence is needed.


Andrei