On Friday, 2 June 2017 at 18:43:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
A clean slate is alluring, and there are several things that can be done differently in Phobos, as there are in any project that's been around for a while. It may, however, be difficult to find enough people able and willing to take such a large project off the ground. There are plenty of great things that can be done with the standard library, ranging from the trivial - documentation, fixes of bugs triaged as "trivial" or "bootcamp" etc - to the most creative.
Indeed, the idea is an inviting one. Fixing mistakes of the past may be tedious, but it is a good way of moving forward. I don't think such a project actually needs a large amount of full-time participants: if not any other reason, it is impractical. We can't reasonably hope to have experts on everything in an OSS project like this, at least not on a day-to-day basis. A small core group inviting PRs and perhaps using a voting system for accepting/rejecting features should suffice. The biggest challenge is to dilute incoming features into most basic forms, simple, efficient and reusable components, which may occasionally fall out of the collective expertise. However, it might be prudent to adopt a waiting stance on this, and let several key language features to mature (i.e. the current DIP queue). The big problem of Phobos is that it grew together with the language, often lagging behind in terms of use of language features, while still growing the code base, depending on obsolete functionality, and making future fixes harder and harder. Repeating this will be a huge mistake, and inevitably will lead to talks about Phobos 3 in a few years.
