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There was a conscious decision to avoid providing a vast standard library because those inevitably become outdated with time. Building a standard library is rel

There was a conscious decision to avoid providing a vast standard library because those inevitably become outdated with time. Building a standard library is relatively easy, maintaining for decades is hard. But it’s a trade off because there are concrete upsides to a large standard library. I wrote about this more - Rust has a small standard library (and that’s ok) - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/rust-stdlib/ https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/rust-stdlib/

cratermoon 3y ago
That does seem to align with my perception of where Rust wants to be: a low-level systems language. For example, the stdlib provide a time package that deals with duration and instant, sufficient to interact with file systems and such, but leaves dealing with dates, times, and all that complexity to the chrono crate. What I would encourage the Rust community to focus on is adding security-sensitive functionality to the standard library. Not the big wad of complexity that is cryptography, but a standard PRNG/RNG/CSPRNG would fit. Also, I do think it's a bit of a mistake to not at least define a relational database API. As it is we have sqlite, mysql, and postgres with similar but slightly different APIs.
- nindalf 3y ago
  Not quite. I don’t think low level languages mean you need a small standard library and high level means you need a large one. You’re pattern matching between Python, Java, Go (all large, older) and now Rust (small and newer). Rust wants to be high level as well, allowing people to solve all kinds of problems of varying complexity in different domains. And to some extent, Rust has succeeded in empowering folks to do this. Rust has found its way into “systems” like browsers (Chromium, Firefox) and Operating Systems (Windows, Linux) but also web software, infrastructure (firecracker), developer tools (ruff, turbopack) and other domains. Like I said, the request for a larger standard library is a reasonable one. But I don’t think it’s going to happen, because Rust seems to be gaining traction in multiple domains without it. By the numbers it looks like it’s growing 10x every 3 years (https://lib.rs/stats https://lib.rs/stats). In such an environment, the folks at the wheel would double down on their approach rather than fundamentally rethinking it.

cratermoon 3y ago

That does seem to align with my perception of where Rust wants to be: a low-level systems language. For example, the stdlib provide a time package that deals with duration and instant, sufficient to interact with file systems and such, but leaves dealing with dates, times, and all that complexity to the chrono crate. What I would encourage the Rust community to focus on is adding security-sensitive functionality to the standard library. Not the big wad of complexity that is cryptography, but a standard PRNG/RNG/CSPRNG would fit. Also, I do think it's a bit of a mistake to not at least define a relational database API. As it is we have sqlite, mysql, and postgres with similar but slightly different APIs.

nindalf 3y ago
Not quite. I don’t think low level languages mean you need a small standard library and high level means you need a large one. You’re pattern matching between Python, Java, Go (all large, older) and now Rust (small and newer). Rust wants to be high level as well, allowing people to solve all kinds of problems of varying complexity in different domains. And to some extent, Rust has succeeded in empowering folks to do this. Rust has found its way into “systems” like browsers (Chromium, Firefox) and Operating Systems (Windows, Linux) but also web software, infrastructure (firecracker), developer tools (ruff, turbopack) and other domains. Like I said, the request for a larger standard library is a reasonable one. But I don’t think it’s going to happen, because Rust seems to be gaining traction in multiple domains without it. By the numbers it looks like it’s growing 10x every 3 years (https://lib.rs/stats https://lib.rs/stats). In such an environment, the folks at the wheel would double down on their approach rather than fundamentally rethinking it.