4 ms·

I love that the go team is hostile to breaking stdlib changes (which is what changing the flag package would be). It is so nice to be able to upgrade to the lat

by helper 11y ago

I love that the go team is hostile to breaking stdlib changes (which is what changing the flag package would be). It is so nice to be able to upgrade to the latest go version without having to worry about what it might break in production. It is true that the go team is cautious about what goes into the stdlib. Part of that is their commitment to long term support of the standard library. To be able to do that effectively they need to be discerning when choosing what to have there vs an external library. But that doesn't mean that they don't take big changes. HTTP2 support will be in 1.6 which is a huge addition.

knughit 11y ago
Then why even have a stdlib? Haskell has problem too, where the Prelude (a std lib imorted into programs by default) is designed for learning the language, and getting real work done requrequires supressing the Prelude to work around its bad performance and unsafe semantics.
- kyrra 11y ago
  They wanted to help get the language off the ground. Without the stdlib at launch, I don't think Go would have been nearly as well received. I feel like it's one of the key pieces people first coming to the language like. The golang.com/x/ packages seems to be handling extending the stdlib at this point.
- nnutter 11y ago
  You could view the standard/core library as the minimum need to make a language pragmatically useful. You could also view it as trying to prevent fragmentation. However, the stability of standard/core libraries is also what causes them to be "where things go to die" because changing them is very hard to do without breaking things. In the case of Go they also prefer to let third parties experiment and determine which design works best rather than trying to guess. So it's all a bit subjective hence the differing opinions. The point is it's people trying to balance trade-offs.

by helper 11y ago

knughit 11y ago

Then why even have a stdlib? Haskell has problem too, where the Prelude (a std lib imorted into programs by default) is designed for learning the language, and getting real work done requrequires supressing the Prelude to work around its bad performance and unsafe semantics.

kyrra 11y ago
They wanted to help get the language off the ground. Without the stdlib at launch, I don't think Go would have been nearly as well received. I feel like it's one of the key pieces people first coming to the language like. The golang.com/x/ packages seems to be handling extending the stdlib at this point.
nnutter 11y ago
You could view the standard/core library as the minimum need to make a language pragmatically useful. You could also view it as trying to prevent fragmentation. However, the stability of standard/core libraries is also what causes them to be "where things go to die" because changing them is very hard to do without breaking things. In the case of Go they also prefer to let third parties experiment and determine which design works best rather than trying to guess. So it's all a bit subjective hence the differing opinions. The point is it's people trying to balance trade-offs.