On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 11:53 PM, David Simcha <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Don Clugston <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> >> More importantly, I think this attention is misplaced. >> Organizationally, the attention needs to be on Phobos, which, in stark >> contrast to DMD, has not noticeably benefited from the move to git. >> Look at the changelogs. There are zillions of compiler fixes, and >> practically nothing for Phobos. >> Phobos is not moving. What can we do to improve the situation? > > > One of the biggest things holding back Phobos development is that so many of > the things that are missing are high-level design issues as much as > implementation issues. (For examples see my previous post that touched on > this: > http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/2011-November/115320.html). > > Implementation and low-level design are a lot more parallelizable than > high-level design because they can be done on the spur of the moment > whenever one has a free hour or two. High-level design tends to require > long discussions if done collaboratively and/or long blocks of free time to > hold a lot of stuff in one's head if done alone. Furthermore, if someone > just hacks something together and the community doesn't like the high-level > design, the work will be completely wasted. This is a deterrent. > > This is compounded by the newsgroup not being the best medium to discuss > design. Asynchronous communication is good for quick messages. In-depth > discussion requires that the people discussing hold a lot of information in > their head at once. When a discussion gets too deep on the newsgroup, it > becomes hard to follow because the amount of context that has to be reloaded > into one's brain to make sense of the latest post becomes too high. Maybe > the core Phobos devs should occasionally use some more synchronous form of > communication (e.g. Skype meetings, chat, etc.) to hammer out high-level > design issues.
I think it would be a good idea to utilize IRC. There's already a rather large D community there, and I'm sure they would be willing to give their .02 in design discussions. > > Lastly, design issues tend to require intimate familiarity with use cases. > I would have no problem implementing a container library (it's just basic > data structures) but I don't feel qualified to do the high-level design here > because I don't understand all the use cases that make it a non-trivial > problem. Probably very few people have diverse enough experience to have a > deep understanding of the tradeoffs involved. > > _______________________________________________ > dmd-internals mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals Regards, Alex _______________________________________________ dmd-internals mailing list [email protected] http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
