On Friday, 4 September 2015 at 22:36:01 UTC, bitwise wrote:
On Friday, 4 September 2015 at 14:40:43 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Friday, 4 September 2015 at 00:05:06 UTC, bitwise wrote:
Thoughts?
std.stream is on the chopping block and has been for years,
and it was decided at dconf that we'd actually get rid of it
now rather than just have it say in the documentation that
it's going away. As I understand it, the only reason that it
wasn't deprecated in 2.068 was because of some sort of issue
with the PR that forced it to be delayed. But there's no point
in making any improvements to it, because that code is not
going to be around for much longer.
- Jonathan M Davis
Wow...this is surprising. At first glance, the streams seemed
to be fairly well done. What's the reason for them being
removed? and what is meant to be the replacement?
It's old (from D1) and does not follow the current best practices
or idioms. If we're going to have a stream solution, it needs to
be range-based. That being said, ranges in and of themselves get
pretty close to streams, and there simply hasn't been a push to
come up with a range-based stream solution where the pieces that
aren't already part of ranges are taken care of. std.stream has
been marked as scheduled for deprecation for years, and no one
has bothered to replace it. It comes up periodically, but no one
seems to care enough to do anything about it. So, rather than
leave it in that state, we decided that it would be better off to
just deprecate it and then get rid of it rather than leave it in
limbo with the documentation saying that it's not up to our
standards and that we're going to get rid of it at some point. At
some point, someone may come up with a range-based stream
solution and get it into Phobos, but until then, we'll just use
straight up ranges, which come close enough for most cases.
std.stdio and std.mmfile make it quite possible to operate on
files with ranges in a manner similar to streams, and std.stdio
allows you to operate on stdin and stdout in a similar manner
(since they're std.stdio.Files).
That being said, std.stream is boost-licensed, and anyone is free
to copy it or fork it so long as the copyright notice is left on
it. So, anyone who wants to use std.stream in their own code even
after it's no longer in Phobos is free to do so. It's just that
the std.stream code is then going to have to be part of their
project rather than Phobos.
- Jonathan M Davis
