On Saturday, 18 June 2016 at 10:25:43 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
[...]
I've given them a list, and they did something else, every time.
Off the top of my head, work items for phobos I've repeatedly
posted in various forms:
[...]
People actually have been working on a lot of the stuff in your
list.
The sweeping Phobos-wide tasks like cutting back on GC use,
making more stuff `@safe`, improving the docs, etc. is getting
worked on all the time. No one is going to go and convert the
entirety of Phobos in one fell swoop, because Phobos is huge and
there is no individual who has the domain knowledge required to
work on every part of it.
Nevertheless, there has been steady progress on those tasks
because whenever people work on some part of Phobos (for whatever
reason), they tend to also do some general cleanup while they're
at it. (This is hindered by the insistence upon splitting work
into many small pull requests, though.)
As for the big module ideas - people have discussed work already
in progress toward a better `std.xml` and a GPU compute library
both here on the forums, and (in the case of the latter) in a
talk at the most recent DConf.
There are specific reasons, aired in the discussions, as to why
people may not be interested in working on BigDecimal (perceived
as being of importance mainly to the finance industry, who is
unlikely to contribute anything back in return) or removing auto
decode (what's the point, when Andrei is emphatic that the
feature itself cannot ever be deprecated?). Even so, those
discussions were very recent; it is quite possible that someone
around here intends to work on them (or already is) and just
hasn't got far enough to want feedback yet.
