On Saturday 19 March 2011 07:43:37 David Nadlinger wrote:
While lying in the bed with fever yesterday (so please excuse any
careless mistakes), I was pondering a bit about the current discussions
regarding Phobos additions, package management, etc. It occurred to me
that there is a central unanswered question, which I think deserves to
be broadly discussed right now.
But first, let me start out by describing how I see current situation
regarding D2. Leaving aside a few minor things like @property
enforcement or the recent suggestions about a new alias syntax, the
language is fairly stable and critical bugs in DMD 2 are not frequent
enough to make it completely unusable for day-to-day development
anymore. Of course, there is still a large way to go for the D toolchain
(with the ideal result being a rock-solid self-hosting compiler
front-end, usable as a library as well), but in a sense, we are more or
less at the end of a certain stage of D2 development.
I think most of you would agree with me if I say that the main goal for
D2 right now should be to build a vibrant library ecosystem around the
language, to foster adoption in real-world applications. There has been
a number of related discussions recently, but as mentioned above, I
think there is a central question:
Have we reached the critical mass yet where it makes sense to split the
effort in a number of smaller library projects, or are we off better
with concentrating on a central, comprehensive standard library
(Phobos), considering the current community size?
I do not really have an answer to this question, but here are a few
thoughts on the topic, which might also help to make clearer what I mean:
I think that adopting a Boost-like review process for Phobos has
certainly been a clever and valuable move, for more than one reason.
First, together with the move to Git, it has helped to reinforce the
point that D2 and Phobos are open to contributions from everyone, given
that they meet certain quality standards. Second, it certainly boosts
code quality of further standard library additions, which had been a
problem for some parts in the past (at least from my point of view, no
offense intended). Third, and this overlaps with another point below, I
think that the quality improvements will also help to reduce bit rot,
which has traditionally been a problem with D libraries.
But however good a fit this model is for the standard library, I think
it is no silver bullet either. There are small, one-off style projects,
arising from a central need, where the amount of time needed to get the
code through the whole review process is prohibitive – even if the code
quality was high enough –, but the result is still usable for the wide
public. Common examples for this would be low-level wrappers for C
libraries, although they don't really qualify for inclusion into Phobos
for other reasons (often, another wrapper layer is needed to be usable
with common D idioms). Also, people new to the language might be scared
away by the mere thought of contributing to a standard library. How to
make sure that these libraries are not forgotten? Maybe a central
package system with SCM (Git, …) integration can help here?
And, which brings me to the next point, how to fight the unfavorable
outcome of having a huge inscrutable pile of half-finished bit-rotten
code, a problem that DSource is currently experiencing? A central,
well-maintained standard library effort with a wider scope could
certainly help to reduce this problem, at least from the (D) user side,
but on the other hand, larger amounts of code de facto becoming
unmaintained would be a problem for it as well.
Should we build something like a staging area, an incubator for
community contributions not taken yet through formal review, but of
interest for a wider audience? What about the etc.* package – would it
be an option to expand it into such an incubation area? If not, what
should it evolve into – a collection of C-level library bindings (see
the recent discussion on SQLite bindings started by David Simcha)? Who
will take care of the maintenance duties?
Looking forward to a stimulating discussion,
David
There has been some discussion in the past of creating an incubator project of
sorts where code which may or may not make it into Phobos can be put so that it
can develop and evolve with people actually using it - maybe even using it
heavily - before it tried to get into Phobos. Once a library was considered
mature enough, it could go through the Phobos review process and attempt to get
into the standard library. If it succeeded, then, in theory, we'd have a well-
used and well-tested library added to Phobos. If it failed, it would still be
around for people to use, and it could continue to be used and evolve - either
to make a later attempt at inclusion in Phobos or to simply live as a 3rd party
library that folks find useful but isn't appropriate for inclusion in the
standard library for one reason or another.
Exactly what the best way to do all this would be, I don't know, but it would
need to be far better manage than the current situation with dsource. The
current activity level of a project would need to clear, as well as how complete
and stable it's considered. DSource is probably the best place to host such a
project, but obviously dsource would have to be cleaned up first, and it would
need someone who was willing to spearhead the effort and manage it. Otherwise,
we'll just end up with a situation similar to what dsource is now.
Really, the problem is that someone needs to take the initiative on this. They
need to work on setting it up and supporting the ecosystem which would result in
a group of such projects. Good ideas tend to be presented around here and then
go nowhere, because no one actually takes the initiative to do them. The
"wouldn't this be a good idea?" tactic doesn't tend to get very far, even if
everyone agrees, simply because someone has to put in the time and effort to do
it, and while people may think that it's a good idea, there are only so many
people working on Phobos and other D-related stuff, and there's a lot to be
done,
and everyone has something that they'd like to see done, and _that_ is what
they're generally working on.
So, I definitely think that an incubation project is a great idea. It has been
proposed before. However, unless someone steps up to the plate and takes on
setting it up and organizing it, it's not going to happen.
- Jonathan M Davis
