On Wed, 2013-02-06 at 08:56 +0100, Don wrote: > Eg, are there entire top-level branches which are obsolete? How > many stupid names are there (eg, "std.algorithm2") which were
Well in order to avoid such "stupid" names, I think it would be a good idea to keep the standard library small. Include only the things that are important to be "standard" in order to ensure interoperability between libraries. Instead we should offer a central place for D libraries, like CPAN for perl or http://pypi.python.org/pypi for python. The benefits: - The base installation stays small, which might be important for everything that is not a PC. - Versioning is easier, because every library can exist in multiple versions, and every project can choose to which version it wants to link. (For backwards compatiblity) -> No stupid names, if the libraries are small, simply deprecate the complete library. -> In fact such a central place is already on my todo list. I have the idea of creating an infrastructure, where you can easily write D scripts, which may import arbitrary libraries from the repository. A tool like rdmd would then notice that the libraries are not installed locally, so it does install them before running the script. (I think of integration with http://openbuildservice.org/ for Linux based systems and some custom installer for Windows.) -> This way we would have a really convenient way for scripting in D and it would be easy to toy around with an idea, before creating an actual project. -> So instead of creating a single monster standard library, just offer a central place for D libraries and automatic dependency management. I hope that I find the time soon to implement such a thing, but it will be a huge amount of work and maybe this is the right occasion to ask, whether anyone else thinks this would be a good idea. Just some of my recent thoughts. Best regards, Robert
