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 on

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.