A few holes (imho) in the ecosystem of libraries

[Andrew]

On Monday, 15 May 2023 at 13:53:15 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> Can't use exceptions since downstream user will use that on 
> WebASM, -betterC not having class etc.
> And I cannot use your library for similar reasons, it uses the 
> runtime, it uses exceptions, it has generic names etc. We have 
> a lot of such libraries, but we have to keep in mind people use 
> D because they are performance-oriented and they may have 
> druntime constraints. Ideally the D runtime would be 
> pay-as-you-go and infinitely portable, but that's not the 
> current state of things.

Yeah, please bear in mind that my goal is to make my library 
ultimately compatible with those not using the D runtime, but for 
prototyping I have indeed made use of exceptions and `std.traits` 
just to get something working. But the idea is to be able to 
achieve your desired functionality like this:

```d
bool getImageInfo(S)(S* stream) if (isByteInputStream!S)
{
     ubyte[3] buf;
     int bytes = stream.read(buf[]);
     if (bytes != 3) return false;
     _dataOffset = buf[0];
     _cmapType = buf[1];
     _imageType = buf[2];
     return true;
}
```

Or I am also working on a concept of "data streams" which 
automatically convert between byte arrays and scalar types in an 
endian-aware manner:

```d
void getImageInfo(S)(S* stream) if (isByteInputStream!S)
{
     auto dIn = dataInputStreamFor(stream, Endianness.BigEndian);
     _dataOffset = dIn.read!ubyte();
     _cmapType = dIn.read!ubyte();
     _imageType = dIn.read!ubyte();
}
```

But I've only been working on it for a few days, I think that 
your input would be greatly appreciated; if you could list on 
that thread some more examples of what you need from a binary IO 
library.