On Tuesday, 9 June 2015 at 17:05:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
My work on allocators takes the last turn before the straight
line. I've arranged with Dicebot to overlap the review period
with finalizing details so I can act on feedback quickly.
After that I'm ready for some major library work, and I had two
things in mind.
One would be a good pass of std.container, in particular (a) a
design review with the DbI glasses on; (b) better documentation
- sadly it seems to me so inadequate as to make containers
themselves unusable; (c) investigate use of UFCS -
std.container's design predates UFCS yet is a perfect fit for
it, and most likely other cool language improvements we've
added since.
The other would be database connectivity. Erik Smith has shown
some cool ideas at DConf, and I encourage him to continue
working on them, but it seems to me this is an area where more
angles mean more connectivity options.
For database connectivity I'm thinking of using ODBC. What I
see is that on all major platforms, vendors offer mature, good
quality ODBC drivers, and most programs that have anything to
do with databases offer ODBC connectivity. So connecting with
ODBC means the individual database drivers are already there;
no need to waste effort on creating drivers for each (or asking
vendors to, which we can't afford).
So I gave myself ten minutes the other night just before I went
to sleep to see if I can get an ODBC rig on my OSX machine
starting from absolutely nothing. I got
http://www.odbcmanager.net but then got confused about where to
find some dumb driver (text, csv) and gave up.
Last night I gave myself another ten minutes, and lo and behold
I got up and running. Got a demo CSV driver from
http://www.actualtech.com/product_access.php (which also
supports Access and others). Then I headed to
http://www.easysoft.com/developer/languages/c/odbc_tutorial.html
and was able to run a simple ODBC application that lists the
available drivers. Nice!
It's trivial work to convert the C headers to D declarations.
Then it's straight library design to offer convenient libraries
on top of the comprehensive but pedestrian ODBC C API. Then,
voilà - we'll have database connectivity for all databases out
there!
Please help me choose what to work on next.
Andrei
Containers.
But - we really need those allocators working in actual released
Phobos first.
