On Thursday, 29 August 2013 at 01:13:15 UTC, Ramon wrote:
Apologies if this is the wrong forum or even the wrong place
but it seems to me there is a kind of tight connection between
dlang and dsource.org (to which the following relates).
I can perfectly well understand that any group around a not yet
globally known language with a not yet richly endowed
assortment of libraries isn't eager to push the kill button on
3rd party/user created modules.
And yes, it sure gives a new user a warm nice feeling to
discover lots of available modules (which after all translates
to a quick start and efficiency for many taskS).
Let me, however, also share my experience and feelings as a
(exited and pleased) newbie to D when one finds out that what
seems to be easily 2/3rd of seemingly available modules are
"dead, exitus, this bird is passed away, gone, dead, and only
sitting there because someone drove a nail through the poor
animal" or, at best optimistically pre-early-alpha (speaking
with a friendly grin).
Feels like a 16 ton weight coming down (if I may borrow again
from Python, here).
And there is another unpleasant side effect: It doesn't feel
profoundly attractive to write something and put it in between
all those dead parrots.
I'd like to suggest therefore that we begin to mildly weed out
dead or stuck-in-dream stage modules or at least discreetly
mark them as RIP.
In case someone is interested in what disappointed me most,
it's hto2 and bcd-gen, bot of which address an important need
and both of which don't look healthy and useful.
This is particularly troublesome as "make C libs work in D"
type tools are essential in any effort to bring D forward in
the world out there.
In case someone feels like hitting me: Hold it. This thread was
written with good intention and the honest worry that a lack of
libs and a lack of some support for bringing in C stuff might
turn out to be regrettable bumps in the road.
A+ -R
I agree we do need to deal with older projects. However I don't
think we can.
Instead maybe we should work towards keeping the wiki up to date
with notable projects?
With regards to c libraries maybe it would be a good idea to
implement a shared library function loader for phobos itself.
That would mean both shared libraries and static libraries are
very easy to implement.
There is e.g. DerelictUtil[0] which provides it if you want it
however.
With regards to making a converter for between C/D bindings.
There is SWIG but I have yet to get that to work well either.
Maybe someone else can elaborate more on this side of things.
I will say this, one thing about D that has annoyed me from the
beginning is the state of the gui libs. Hence why in last month
I've been having a real good play around with OpengGL and
creating my own library [1].
There is also a few tools missing here and there. For example the
conversion of binary assets to D arrays [2]. Works, but not the
best.
I know I'm advertising some of my own projects here but I think
it's relevant to point out my own experience.
Another area that does need some work is database connectivity. I
did make some bindings to OpenDBX[3]. Which I need to redo as of
Derelict3 being split up.
I might get that into DUB if somebody wants it.
OpenDBX[4] has multiple database interfaces using a common api.
We do have sqlite bindings in Phobos however and sqlite itself
bundled with dmd (not zip on Windows I believe however).
On that note DUB[5] is becoming quite "community official" build
manager.
These packages _should_ all be up to date however we may need to
focus on that?
Somebody else should suggest regarding this as I haven't got
experience on it yet. This may solve the issue you mentioned with
dsource.
[0] https://github.com/DerelictOrg/DerelictUtil
[1] https://github.com/rikkimax/DOOGLE
[2]
https://bitbucket.org/alphaglosined/misc-work/src/cf15ec6b1e3cf888885128b8ea5c5ce4a07f446f/Tools/Bin2D.d?at=default
[3]
https://github.com/rikkimax/Derelict3-Extras/tree/master/import/derelict/opendbx
[4] http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/OpenDBX/Support
[5] http://code.dlang.org/
