On Saturday, 18 February 2017 at 22:48:53 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky
wrote:
[...]
For some time I was a proponent of yanking stuff from Phobos
into oblivion. Now I'm not. Stop breaking code. Yes, we should
think harder before introducing libraries into Phobos but
continuing on with removal of stuff just introduces the
continuous churn for no adequate benefit.
What would anyone get from std.net.curl removal? Are you going
to find all of D programs and patch them to use something else?
Yes, Phobos is full of historical accidents and cruft. I'm
constantly tempted to propose Phobos v2 properly _designed_
(not *grown*) and without the junk. I really think it might be
a good idea but only when we actually know what a proper design
looks like.
Due to writing the AppStream metadata generator in D, which is an
infrastructure piece of many Linux distributions, I have a fair
bit of knowledge now about the problems people (especially
newcomers who just want to scratch an itch and submit a quick
patch) encounter when working with D code. The inconsistent
standard library is - after compiler bugs - the biggest issue.
Some people described Phobos as "PHP-esque" in terms of design,
and I have to agree with them. Working with it is often
unpleasant, and you can clearly see which parts of it were
designed recently and which are "historical accidents".
Constantly shuffling stuff around in Phobos and adding/removing
things will not solve the problem, it will just give newcomers a
feeling of insecurity and make the language feel less mature.
Stunningly, a lot of projects write their own primitives instead
of using Phobos (Vibe, lots of dub modules just providing
containers, just now another general purpose utility library was
announced on the forums, ...) which is a clear sign that Phobos
isn't seen to be sufficient.
I think investigating to build a "Phobos2" standard library would
be a very good idea - make it opt-in for a while, and then set a
flag-date and switch, so people will only need to adjust their
code once to jump on the new version, and don't constantly need
to play catch with Phobos API breaks and riddle their code with
version() and static if instructions to be able to compile with
multiple Phobos and LDC/GDC/DMD versions.
Cheers,
Matthias
