On 19-01-2012 22:26, Zachary Lund wrote:
On Thursday, 19 January 2012 at 21:22:23 UTC, Zachary Lund wrote:
On Thursday, 19 January 2012 at 19:06:41 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
On 19-01-2012 19:52, Zachary Lund wrote:
I've been wondering in the back of my mind for awhile now and it really
hasn't bothered me much but I figured I might as well get it off my
mind.
Why is there a need for a default "standard" library? I can understand
about some of the core stuff, but hell, even threads can be handled via
a 3rd party library. Why must Phobos or any library be a part of D
itself?
I'm unfamiliar with the reason for C++ having a standard library as
well
(which I bring up when people bitch about poor design or something
similar which I usually get no viable or any answer at all). More of an
ignorant question probably but oh well...
Without a standard library, interoperation between libraries becomes
a huge pain, because there's no standard interface/design for various
things such as threads, containers, bigints, networking, file I/O, etc.
Not to mention, if a standard library didn't exist, you'd have to
adapt your build system to whatever arbitrary amount of libraries you
need to use.
C++ has interoperability between containers and allocators which have
done much good. However, they hardly have any libraries that force
preferential design that doesn't require flexible implementation.
Things like bigint and networking are not based on optimized or
flexible implementation but on ease of use. You generally choose a
BigInt library that is the easiest to use, not the one that has the
most flexibility when it comes to which implementation it uses or the
one that is most optimized. Also, I'm not sure who would reuse the
std.socket design. There are plenty of libraries that give a more
robust and clean interface to sockets.
I don't mind robustness but I do not like being forced onto a
preferential design (which doesn't require flexible implementation)
simply because it is in the "standard". I do not think the etc.curl or
std.bigint promote library interoperability. Thus, I do not think
these modules belong in the library considered "standard".
Also, libraries aren't really that big of a pain to add to a build
system. It's generally just a matter of finding where the library is.
On Linux, this is simple. On Windows, it generally requires either
environmental variable or user input. I don't see any way around this
nor do I find putting everything into one glob of a library a solution.
I also forgot to mention about library reuse. You don't tend to use
BigInt libraries all the time. In 6 years of programming, I've not used
a single one. Nor have I used regex in a C program. Nor have I needed
the constant use of MD5 hashing. And I sure as hell did not need the
constant use of CURL or ZLib nor have I ever even used those libraries.
Right. But again: Nobody forces you to link to all of Phobos.
--
- Alex
