• Marcel Meyer (15/15) Feb 18 2004 Hi,
• Ilya Minkov (14/36) Feb 18 2004 Phobos is very OS-neutral, but it is not enough to work efficiently with...
• Juanjo =?ISO-8859-15?Q?=C1lvarez?= (42/48) Feb 18 2004 I'm currently doing the development of a unix library (hopefully std.uni...
• resistor mac.com (10/25) Feb 18 2004 In case my email doesn't give it away, I'm a Mac user. ;)

Marcel Meyer <meyerm fs.tum.de> writes:

Hi,

please take this as a real question and no assumption :-)

Whenever a new language appears it is used mostly by people using the
originating OS. Dylan is quite Mac OS centric, most academic languages are
very Unix-centric and D, well, looks a little bit windows-centric.

Of course there are guys using it with other OSs, meanwhile there is even a
linux compiler from walter himself. But I'm just curious if the developers
of f.ex. phobos are considerate of Mac OS, other Unices etc. What do you
think? Will it be a "windows-optimised" language/lib and later be patched
to fit other OSs or do you have confidence in the long sight of the bigger
part of the developers? :-)

Please don't take this as any offence or so. I just saw some very nice ideas
beeing buried since they were too windows centric and therefore unusable.

Thank you very much for your objective statement/opinion ;-)


Marcel

Ilya Minkov <minkov cs.tum.edu> writes:

Phobos is very OS-neutral, but it is not enough to work efficiently with 
D. As to what independant libraries conserns, it just depends on the 
users and library-writers - their number, inidvidual preferences, and so 
  on. In general, the more enthusiastic users there are, the better 
different platforms are covered.

I am a Windows user myself, and i believe that many Windows users are 
conserned with platform independant design, since we may not always stay 
where we are. ;)

The reason for which D seems to be Windows-centric is that the original 
compiler has been for Windows, and it will take a while till GCC-based 
compiler can rival with it. And i heard the DMD for Linux also has 
problems yet, namely lacking debugging facility.

-eye

Marcel Meyer wrote:
 Hi,
 
 please take this as a real question and no assumption :-)
 
 Whenever a new language appears it is used mostly by people using the
 originating OS. Dylan is quite Mac OS centric, most academic languages are
 very Unix-centric and D, well, looks a little bit windows-centric.
 
 Of course there are guys using it with other OSs, meanwhile there is even a
 linux compiler from walter himself. But I'm just curious if the developers
 of f.ex. phobos are considerate of Mac OS, other Unices etc. What do you
 think? Will it be a "windows-optimised" language/lib and later be patched
 to fit other OSs or do you have confidence in the long sight of the bigger
 part of the developers? :-)
 
 Please don't take this as any offence or so. I just saw some very nice ideas
 beeing buried since they were too windows centric and therefore unusable.
 
 Thank you very much for your objective statement/opinion ;-)
 
 
 Marcel

Juanjo =?ISO-8859-15?Q?=C1lvarez?= <juanjux NOSPAMyahoo.es> writes:

Marcel Meyer wrote:


 Of course there are guys using it with other OSs, meanwhile there is even
 a linux compiler from walter himself. But I'm just curious if the
 developers of f.ex. phobos are considerate of Mac OS, other Unices etc.

I'm currently doing the development of a unix library (hopefully std.unix).
It will have three parts:

1. Just exports of Unix libc functions, constants and structs (80% done) in
std.c.unix.unix, std.c.unix.data and std.c.unix.constants (those file will
probably get splitted into some more files since currently
std.c.unix.constants has a zillion definitions and polutes too much the
namespace). Also, currently it will probably only work on 32bits machines
since I didn't have the time to browse the /usr/include maddness to see
which type_t types where fixes size and which werent. It also needs
versioning() to support unixes other than Linux (I'm developing it under
linux). I'll need help with those last two problems.

2. std.unix.unix: Functions that are adaptations of the former to D syntax:
Using exceptions (which msg get build with strerror so you have the same
message you would got in C) instead of ugly return values/errno polling,
using associative arrays to return some values, using out/inout parameters
and char[] strings instead of pointers, etc. This is 70% done (I need to
write the exception-throwing code and to remove some functions duplicated
in std), but it will need a lot of testing. This module includes:

Basic filesystem management: (f)open, (f)close, creat, (f)read, (f)write,
*seek, *stat, *chdir, *mkdir, *rmdir, getcwd, pipe, dup, *close, chroot,
*chmod, *chown, link, symlink, mkfifo, readlink, truncate, fsync,
fdatasync, fcntl, mknod, mount, etc

Terminals: tc*, cf*, etc.

Time: *time*, *timeofday, localtime, etc.

Error control: perror, herror, strerror etc (not that you need it since it
uses exceptions), etc.

Process: fork, kill, *wait*, get*id, getgroups, set*id, putenv, raise,
umask, getlogin, etc.

Network: socket, send* recv*, listen, bind, accept, shutdown, *hostent*,
get*by*, ntohl and family, etc.

IPC and sync: mmap, ftok, msg*, sem*, sh*, sig*, 

System info: uname, sysconf, etc.

3. A class library wrapping some of those functions (terminal,
sockets-streams, mmap-streams, semaphores, shared memory, etc. I will not


And since I'm doing this on my free time I would definitively appreciate
help on the task, specially for makeing it work on 64 bits archs (lots of
aliases needed with versioning, like the libc typedefs) and other Unixes.
If somebody is interested and can host a public CVS server I could put all


 What do you think? Will it be a "windows-optimised" language/lib and later
 be patched to fit other OSs or do you have confidence in the long sight of
 the bigger part of the developers? :-)

Definitively the later.

resistor mac.com writes:

In case my email doesn't give it away, I'm a Mac user. ;)

I'm not a compiler writer, but I love D as a language.  If the GCC compiler
reaches maturity (which I 
have the utmost confidence in!  Go Ben!), I'd be interested in trying to bridge
the Mac OS X Cocoa API 
into D.  Afterall, Objective-C is in fact largely a macro on top of pure C, and
Objective-C calls can be 
made with carefully made C calls to the runtime.  Hey, I can hope!

Owen

In article <c0vqip$1ojr$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Marcel Meyer says...
Hi,

please take this as a real question and no assumption :-)

Whenever a new language appears it is used mostly by people using the
originating OS. Dylan is quite Mac OS centric, most academic languages are
very Unix-centric and D, well, looks a little bit windows-centric.

Of course there are guys using it with other OSs, meanwhile there is even a
linux compiler from walter himself. But I'm just curious if the developers
of f.ex. phobos are considerate of Mac OS, other Unices etc. What do you
think? Will it be a "windows-optimised" language/lib and later be patched
to fit other OSs or do you have confidence in the long sight of the bigger
part of the developers? :-)

Please don't take this as any offence or so. I just saw some very nice ideas
beeing buried since they were too windows centric and therefore unusable.

Thank you very much for your objective statement/opinion ;-)


Marcel