Walter Bright wrote:
> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
>> Walter is a true compiler expert, but I think he wants to leave the
>> development of libraries to those who are more experienced with
>> different kinds of frameworks. Besides, he already has more than enough
>> work in extending the language and maintaining the compiler.
> 
> What I'm mindful of is I endorsed DWT as the official D gui library, which promptly killed it.

I think that one of the most important issues with choosing DWT as an official GUI library was, and still is, that it's not yet crossplaform. That had to turn away people using GDC and *NIX OSes. Multiplatform language with Windows-only (at the time) official GUI library. I think that doesnt work...

Walter Bright wrote:
> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
> 
>> Walter is a true compiler expert, but I think he wants to leave the
>> development of libraries to those who are more experienced with
>> different kinds of frameworks. Besides, he already has more than enough
>> work in extending the language and maintaining the compiler.
> 
> 
> What I'm mindful of is I endorsed DWT as the official D gui library, which promptly killed it.

I completely disagree. THAT did not kill DWT. If you did a survey I would guess there arent a lot of D users who liked SWT or AWT in the first place. And just looking at the DWT code makes me shudder. Actually, your endorsement probably just put it on life support....

Shame on you, Walter.  You should know better than to think you have that much influence. ;D

The momentum died for strictly different reasons (most notable being the lack of contributors).  Your choice and timing just happened to be off on the matter. Okay, I admit that there was one other significant issue that was a personal annoyance: you failed to contact or discuss /anything/ with the people considering the ports of DWT (myself, Carlos ). You just announced the ports and that we were doing them (even though you had no idea what are personal feelings on the matter were or how serious we were about it).  I recall being quite shocked at your announcement. I think Carlos was too.

Regardless, we all know that GUI Frameworks are particularly troublesome to endorse since the area is so subjective.  It's probably a lost cause trying to support one over the other.  Best to encourage any GUI that people are willing to develop for D because I don't think any one framework will be acceptable as a standard.

As for standard libraries, I think you should be ready to endorse an organized effort that presents itself with these traits:

1. Is well documented
2. Meets the general approval of the community
3. Continues to be developed for multiple compilers in tandem (dmd
and gdc)
4. Is actively developed for multiple platforms (linux, win32, Mac
OS X)
5. Has a strategy layed out for future direction
6. Has a dedicated core group of developers that have shown
dedication to the D language.
7. Is maintained under a version control system

Such traits by far surpass what Phobos can offer.  From my perspective, the act of endorsing such an effort hardly constitutes a risk.

-JJR

Walter Bright wrote:
> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
>> Walter is a true compiler expert, but I think he wants to leave the development of libraries to those who are more experienced with different kinds of frameworks. Besides, he already has more than enough work in extending the language and maintaining the compiler.
> 
> What I'm mindful of is I endorsed DWT as the official D gui library, which promptly killed it.

LOL. It's just that I really don't believe there can be only one "official" GUI library. Even Java has AWT, Swing, SWT and now they're even porting QT to Java. There are always at least a) licensing, b) technical and c) political issues involved.

Most of the D libraries have been released under very liberal licenses. I don't think closed source businesses have anything against that. Neither does the open source community. Having several competing gui libraries gives best of the both worlds to the developers.

But a standard library is more tightly coupled with the core language. One of the strong points in Java has been that it's easy to use the basic stuff like collections and I/O. These have advanced a lot since Java 1.0, but still there has been less competing libraries in this area than for C++ (AFAIK). There is already a lot of basic stuff ready for D out there under a very liberal license. If only they could be an integral part of the language distribution.

The "standard library" is IMO missing things like templated collections, a clone of Java I/O libraries (streams), a String-class (many people really want it), some network code and maybe more libraries for multithreaded applications.

John Reimer wrote:
> As for standard libraries, I think you should be ready to endorse an organized effort that presents itself with these traits:
> 
> 1. Is well documented
> 2. Meets the general approval of the community
> 3. Continues to be developed for multiple compilers in tandem (dmd
> and gdc)
> 4. Is actively developed for multiple platforms (linux, win32, Mac
> OS X)
> 5. Has a strategy layed out for future direction
> 6. Has a dedicated core group of developers that have shown
> dedication to the D language.
> 7. Is maintained under a version control system
> 
> Such traits by far surpass what Phobos can offer.  From my perspective, the act of endorsing such an effort hardly constitutes a risk.

Amen to that :)

John Reimer wrote:
 > Regardless, we all know that GUI Frameworks are particularly
> troublesome to endorse since the area is so subjective.  It's
> probably a lost cause trying to support one over the other.  Best
> to encourage any GUI that people are willing to develop for D
> because I don't think any one framework will be acceptable as a
> standard.
> 
> As for standard libraries, I think you should be ready to endorse
> an organized effort that presents itself with these traits:
> 
> 1. Is well documented
> 2. Meets the general approval of the community
> 3. Continues to be developed for multiple compilers in tandem (dmd
> and gdc)
> 4. Is actively developed for multiple platforms (linux, win32, Mac
> OS X)
> 5. Has a strategy layed out for future direction
> 6. Has a dedicated core group of developers that have shown
> dedication to the D language.
> 7. Is maintained under a version control system
> 
> Such traits by far surpass what Phobos can offer.  From my
> perspective, the act of endorsing such an effort hardly constitutes
> a risk.
> 
> -JJR
> 

Reading the past posts about the DWT endorsement, it seems like it lacked some well defined criteria like the above and a review process. There was no consensus in the discussion.

Personally I would not mind seeing DDL, Mango and Derelict endorsed (and shipped as one package by DM), these are the most mature / relevant projects at dsource?
Derelict is a prime example how a well thought out standard for doing things (bindings in this case) makes life easier. It should be a boost both for D and the respective libraries if they come together. True, you can get a lot of stuff *right now* but I found myself researching a lot in the past for what is available. I have a graveyard of old half-assed wheels still somewhere in my dev folder.

On a related note, is DTL vaporware or will it be revived? I know, I know, C++ sucks but STL provided some pretty cool things if you got used to it, most importantly a standard way of doing lots of stuff which makes it easier to read and even extend other STL-using code. I would love to see something like this in D.

Walter Bright wrote:
> What I'm mindful of is I endorsed DWT as the official D gui library, which promptly killed it.

IMHO, more important than having an official GUI library, would be to actually have _something_ right inside dmd.zip!

It doesn't have to be the world and the kitchen sink, but anybody downloading dmd.zip should be able to write a GUI hello world simply and easily.

On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:44:03 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
>> Walter is a true compiler expert, but I think he wants to leave the development of libraries to those who are more experienced with different kinds of frameworks. Besides, he already has more than enough work in extending the language and maintaining the compiler.
> 
> What I'm mindful of is I endorsed DWT as the official D gui library, which promptly killed it.

What about the library contest I suggested long ago ??
Is that a useful idea?
I did never get much feedback on that idea.

http://all-technology.com/eigenpolls/dwishlist/index.php?it=59

rm wrote:

> If other reasonings can/need be give, please do so ..
> 
> So back to libraries for D in D :-)
> What could be the reasons the Senior Darch is *ignoring* this?
> - he doesn't see a need for it (right now)
>    => so it's low on his priority list
> - he doesn't have the resources to coordinate such an effort
> - he's planning to release D 1.0 before starting to think on libraries
>    => are we talking about specifications for libraries
>    => are we talking about a specific implementation (license?)
> - building libraries when important features are still being added
>    => that might be regrettable in the not to distant future
>    => when do you start with "standard" libraries, when do you stop
> evolving the language
> - are we talking about minimal batteries, or full blown batteries?

I think a batteries-included distribution would be a great help.
The current situation makes it more difficult than it needs to be to get going with D.  There's good stuff out there but you have to get this bit from here, then download dbuild from there, and mango from there etc etc.

A batteries-included version should include
* the best of the best from Dsource,
* all the bindings and wrappers that are out there (SDL, GL, system headers, wxD etc)
* editor integration scripts & tools from the wiki
* and numerous sample programs that demonstrate good D coding practices
* and samples showing how to accomplish various tasks in D
  > text processing
  > shell-script type things
  > a little game demo
  > GUI programming
  > template metaprogramming
  > good use of modules
  > numerical computing
  > etc...).
* And it should have an installer for platforms where that makes sense.

This seems like it would be a very good thing to have ready for the official 1.0 release.  The 1.0 announcement will at the very least get attention from Slashdot I'm sure, and probably from other quarters of the net as well.  It would be good if the folks who come poking to see what 1.0 looks like were greeted with a user-friendly package that gives them everything they need to be productive with D, and see instantly how useful D is for a wide variety of things.

I think most of this stuff exists already, except maybe sample programs, but it's more a matter of putting it all together and getting permission from everyone to bundle it all up into one package.

I don't have the time (or knowledge) to make such a beast, but I'd surely be willing to do testing of it (the Windows version, anyway).

--bb

Knud Sørensen wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:44:03 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
>>> Walter is a true compiler expert, but I think he wants to leave the
>>> development of libraries to those who are more experienced with
>>> different kinds of frameworks. Besides, he already has more than enough
>>> work in extending the language and maintaining the compiler.
>> What I'm mindful of is I endorsed DWT as the official D gui library, which promptly killed it.
> 
> What about the library contest I suggested long ago ?? Is that a useful idea?
> I did never get much feedback on that idea. 
> 
> http://all-technology.com/eigenpolls/dwishlist/index.php?it=59
> 

This is a great idea. I think Walter just needs to encourage library competition while giving good libraries recognition.

How about a "Top 10 D libraries" page on digitalmars D where the D community votes for the top 10 libraries each month on the newsgroups and then they get a very special recognition on the digitalmars site?