On 3/29/11 2:33 PM, Cristi Cobzarenco wrote:
Surely, .mangleof returns unique strings?
Yes, .mangleof returns unique strings for types. The stringof property
which was suggested by other people here on the NG, however, is not unique.
[…] Thanks a lot for your feedback, I feel this
collaboration will help D in the end, no matter whose proposal gets
accepted (if any). I am a bit confused regarding your GSoC proposal,
aren't you a mentor?
No, I'm just hoping to participate in this GSoC as a student as well.
To clarify the situation: Having experienced how incredibly useful
dimensional analysis is in many areas of science, I have long been
interested in possible ways of using unit systems in programming to gain
additional type safety. Earlier this year, before a possible application
to GSoC was even brought up in the D community, I started to work on a D
implementation of an unit system. I finished a working prototype, but
didn't have the time yet to implement a flexible unit conversion scheme
and, more importantly, extend the documentation and examples so I could
put it up for discussion at the D NG.
Then, it was announced that Digital Mars would participate in this
Google Summer of Code, and surprisingly it didn't take long until
someone added an unit system to the ideas page. As I was considering to
apply to GSoC anyway, this seemed like a natural fit. However, Andrei
also put up the idea of a D implementation of Apache Thrift, which
caught my attention as I have been waiting for the opportunity to have
an in-depth look on it for quite some time now.
As I am equally interested in both topics, and students are allowed to
submit a large number of proposals (20?), I decided to just write
project proposals for both of them and let Walter/Andrei/… choose which
one they like better, if any. I decided to start with the Thrift one,
and planned to submit my units proposal later in the application period.
After publishing my first draft here at the NG, I also contacted Andrei
for his opinion on whether it would make sense to submit a second
proposal, given that he seemed quite interested in the Thrift idea.
Now, back to topic: I am absolutely sure that collaborating on this
project will lead to better results (I mean, that's how open source
software works after all), but there is a problem: By the GSoC rules,
it's not possible for students to work in teams on a single project. The
dilemma I hinted at is that if we start working together right now,
we'll probably end up with two almost identical proposals/applications
for the same project, which doesn't really seem desirable.
Also, I'm increasingly doubtful that an units library would be a good
fit for a Summer of Code project in the first place, which is also why I
finished my other proposal first:
As Don said, I think that while it certainly is a nice demonstration of
the metaprogramming capabilities/type system expressiveness of a
language, it might not be too useful for the »general public«, compared
to other features. Don't get me wrong here, I'm personally very
enthusiastic about the idea, and I can imagine many possible ways in
which a flexible unit system could be used to avoid bugs or to clarify
interfaces. But: The concept isn't new at all – for example, during my
research I stumbled over papers dedicated to units in programming
languages dating back to 1985 –, but I have yet to see units actually
being used in production code.
My second concern is the extent of the project: After spending two
weekends on it, I have a working prototype of a units library, and, if I
understood you correctly, you have one as well. They surely both lack
some features and a lot of polish and documentation, but I think it
would probably take neither of us three full months of work to get them
into a state suitable for inclusion in the Phobos review queue.
For these reasons, I really started to wonder if it wouldn't be the
better idea to just merge our projects and work on getting the result
into shape independent of GSoC when I saw your proposal – even more so
since our design/implementation ideas have shown to be quite similar. I
don't want to discourage you from applying at all, and I will probably
still submit a proposal for it nevertheless, but I think this should be
discussed.
David
