On Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at 07:56:26 UTC, Don wrote:
In the "Implementing Half Floats in D" thread, we seemed to
have reached a consensus on two important points:
(a) Phobos should have a broad scope (rather than being small
like the C standard library).
(b) The current flat structure of Phobos (every module in the
root) does not scale to hundreds of modules.
It's not quite unanimous on (a), but seems to be close enough.
Together, (a) and (b) mean we need a plan. The sooner we can do
it, the less painful it will be. But, on the other hand, it's
something that we really don't want to get wrong.
Personal taste plays a huge role in this (Practically any
structure can work, but we're looking for an arrangement which
is intuitive and aesthetically pleasing to as many people as
possible). It'll be most productive to stick to uncontroversial
facts as long as possible.
It would be great if people with extensive experience in other
languages could give a brief description of the structure of
the corresponding libraries. (Also include pseudo-standard
libraries, for example boost in C++).
1. How many total modules are there? How old is the library?
What is the recent growth rate of the library (Percentage
increase in size per year, over whatever time interval is
reasonable for that library)?
2. How deep is the hierarchy? How many top-level branches are
there?
3. How has the library dealt with obsolete functions and
modules? Eg, are there entire top-level branches which are
obsolete? How many stupid names are there (eg,
"std.algorithm2") which were forced by the original design
becoming obsolete?
4. How much of the library is successful/convincing? To make it
a bit less subjective: how much of the library is commonly
ignored, in favour of using third-party libraries instead?
Which areas are failures in this way (eg, GUI, database, ...)?
Which areas are the most often praised?
Maybe such a survey already exists, but I haven't been able to
find an existing one.
Java Standard Library:
Total of 209 packages.
3 top-level packages:
java ( 56 packages, 13 top level within java)
javax (117 packages, 20 top level within javax)
org ( 36 packages, 4 top-level within org)
Max depth of package tree:
5
Duplicated Names:
java.io and java.nio (new io)
java.net and javax.net
java.lang and javax.lang
Note that javax was initially intended to be an experimental
library where its packages would get moved to the java library
eventually. But the first time they tried to move a package from
javax to java there were a lot of complaints. Too much broken
code. So the experimental library become an addition to the
standard library.
Paul
