On 01/31/2013 08:02 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Interesting. I think Phobos can be easily divided into two parts, with core stuff like std.algorithm, std.range, std.stdio, etc., in one, and less common but still widely applicable stuff like numeric algorithms in a "2nd party" library (or libraries).
Speaking as a researcher, I've on occasion had cause to call on stuff from such "2nd party" libraries, and it's not necessarily a happy experience.
A while ago I had cause to call on a package in CRAN, the contributed package archive for the R statistical programming language. It wasn't one of the modules that's packaged for Debian et al., so I had to pull things in directly from R's own package management and build and install locally.
In and of itself, R makes this very easy, but what I wasn't prepared for was that in installing the one package I was interested in, it would pull in and install dozens of other CRAN packages. And then, when I looked inside the code, actually finding out what it was doing was nightmarish, because the module of interest was built on top of several other contributions by the same authors. Understanding the code involved a massive wild goose chase through all those other contributed modules to find what functions were being called and what they did.
I don't know if this is typical of CRAN packages, because I tend to use R infrequently, but my strong impression was of code that had been built, thrown over the wall and then built on top of without any attention to design, integration or performance (when I re-implemented the algorithms using Octave/MATLAB they were much faster, and I doubt this was down to the superiority of the language or interpreter).
And this code wasn't built by stupid people -- they were very good statisticians. In their defence, I suspect the reason they built higgledy-piggledy as they did was because they knew their earlier modules _worked_ and reliability was the most important thing for them.
That's the cost of 2nd-party libraries -- they are very hit-and-miss in terms of design, sustainability and hence, reliability.
Now, that said, I think a "2nd-party" repository for D could be a great project, but what I _wouldn't_ like to see was that repository being considered an adequate replacement for carefully designed standard library functionality. One of the things I love about D is precisely the breadth of Phobos' support, and it feels like the solution to Phobos' problems is a better design and review process rather than ringfencing a too-small set of core functionality.
Of course, a 2nd-party repository could be part of the prototyping and experimentation behind new standard-library work, just as Boost is for C++.
