Tango future versus D1 discontinuation

Question

Knowing that D1 will be discontinued effective December 31, 2012, is it still worth it to continue using Tango given that the official distribution is under D1?

Heidyheifer

Answer 1

If you're talking about whether it's worth continuing to use Tango with D1 once official support for D1 goes away, then I think that that's pretty much the same answer as whether it's worth continuing to use D1. The lack of D1 support for dmd really shouldn't have any effect on whether Tango for D1 is still usable. The real question is whether you want to stick with D1 in spite of its lack of support or whether you want to move to D2.

Now, assuming that you want to move to D2...

Personally, I'd advise looking to Phobos first and foremost, because it's the standard library, and while it still has room to improve, it's far better than it was for D1. It also has definite community support and continues to grow. New projects are most likely to be using Phobos and are only likely to be using Tango if they were ported from D1.

However, there's no reason why you can't use Tango in D2 if you want to - especially if you're porting code from D1. There is a fork of Tango which was recently ported to D2. And just like any 3rd party library, you can choose to use it in your code if you want to. You can even use it alongside Phobos if you want to (unlike with D1), though their styles are very different. It's really up to you whether you use Phobos or Tango primarily.

If your concern is that Tango will not be supported in the long run - especially with the official version still being D1-only - I don't think that anyone can really predict that. I expect that it will be, but it wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't really evolve much further, simply because the majority of D2 users are going to be using Phobos. Phobos will be maintained, because it's the standard library. Who knows what will happen with Tango. But the D2 fork is currently maintained, and it could be that a community will grow around that (be it D1 Tango users moving to D2 or D2 users deciding that they want to use it), and it'll continue to be a strong, well-supported library. There's just no way to know at this point.

So, Phobos is your best bet, but there's really no reason not to use Tango if you want to.

Sheldon

Thank you for answering. I am convinced that Phobos is a must but I also expect the official Tango team to switch to D2. Too many forks don't reassure me. – Heidyheifer

Answer 2

Judging by the fact that there is a fork (mentioned already by Jonathan) of Tango which works with D2, I firmly believe there will be an increasing user-base around the D2 port, and I certainly believe some of the Tango modules even deserve to be moved to Phobos. First Tango things that come to mind are conduits and selectors. Phobos does not offer anything even remotely comparable with them, so I believe in bright future of Tango2 .

Blanchblancha

If someone asks me, I would move all good stuff from Tango to Phobos. - Suff that MAKES SENSE to be moved, not everything! The rest, should stay in Tango and continue being developed as a high-level API on top of druntime and Phobos. – Blanchblancha

The primary roadblock for moving anything from Tango to Phobos is that their licenses are incompatible (Tango is BSD and Phobos is Boost). Otherwise, I expect that some of it would have been ported already. But as it is, unless the original authors decide to contribute to Phobos, that can't happen. Phobos is increasing in size and capabilities thanks to community involvement, but there's definitely plenty which could and should be added. – Sheldon