On 2011-09-06 11:09, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Tuesday, September 06, 2011 18:54:45 Josh Simmons wrote:
This would be true if there were only implementation differences
between libraries doing roughly the same thing (in which case you'd
not need a new library anyway). Unfortunately this is not how things
work.
So simple 2d graphics ey? vector or raster based? immediate rendering
or scene graph representation? animation? fonts? textures?
XML ey? SAX, DOM, Pull, Data Binding? XPath? XSLT?
The problem with php isn't just it's awesome naming, it's the fact
that anything that seemed like something somebody might use was added
as opposed to limiting itself to the must-haves.
Other major languages (such as Java and C#) have large standard libraries and
have done quite well with them. In fact, I believe that the large size of
their standard libraries is generally seen as major advantage of those
languages.
No, we can't have everything in the standard library. No, an XML parser in the
standard library likely won't meet everyone's needs. However, having a large
standard library can be of great benefit to the users of the language even if
it doesn't solve every problem that they could possibly have. The question
isn't really whether we should add stuff like XML parsing to Phobos. The
question is what is the best general implementation for a such a module and
whether we can get an implementation of high enough quality to be able to go
in the standard library. It's a question of time, man power, and quality.
Phobos could have a low level XML parsing module and on top of that
other XML APIs can be built, like SAX, DOM and so on. This is how the
XML modules in Tango are built. Tango has a low level XML pull parse.
Built on top of that are a SAX API and a DOM document.
Obviously, Phobos is not going to explode in size overnight, but it _is_ going
to grow in size, and eventually it should be fairly large. We already have
several useful additions in the review queue which will likely make it into
Phobos in one form or another over the next few months.
- Jonathan M Davis
--
/Jacob Carlborg
