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> I think we should be taking a more “batteries included” approach to language and library design. The entire reason we’re in this mess is because we’ve decided

> I think we should be taking a more “batteries included” approach to language and library design. The entire reason we’re in this mess is because we’ve decided it’s ok or maybe even preferable if stdlibs are rail thin, rendering base languages near-unusable. Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though. It works for something like Go, because it is largely used for servers and command line tools from what I can tell. For Rust, well I would like to prioritise features for embedded development, someone else might want game dev features (geometry and physics stuff), yet another person wants data science things. And so on. And even if did put some of those things in std, that is stable forever. That is how C++ ended up with an unusably slow regex implementation in the standard library. And it isn't fixable. Everyone just ignores it and uses a third party library like PCRE, RE2, etc instead (depending on their specific needs). I would not expect web or GUI things in the standard library for this reason, those standards change too frequently for that to be stable forever. And even something like Python, which is known for data science and machine learning, doesn't have core libraries for those activities in the standard library. Numpy, Pandas, Scipy, Pytorch etc are all third party projects.

ksbd-pls-finish 2mo ago
Well I use python daily for the past 10 years and I never did data science. Data science? Everyone knows python is the language of cyber security.
piker 2mo ago
Maybe that’s a good place to make the cut. One Rust crate for game dev, one for data science, etc. Then their deps are pinned and monitored by the crate maintainers.
barnabee 2mo ago
I wrote this on another thread recently, but my line for exclusion from standard library is a library that’s any one of: - not obviously/generally useful (i.e. useless or too specific/should be a program not a library) - obviously trivial (code it yourself when you need it/compose from other primitives) - already available (open source) elsewhere by a credible team that supports and maintains it Anything else… put it in the stdlib
Orphis 2mo ago
C++ ended up in that situation because they don't want to break backwards compatibility (ABI, API) or change contracts, except in some rare cases, even on major releases. Quite often, it is a vendor issue to break the ABI and fix issues, and some have refused to do that. It's a self-inflicted issue that most other languages with "batteries included" don't have since they will document breakage and upgrade paths when anything changes, or they are not impacted as much since they are using an intermediate language as interface and avoid most ABI issues. The implementation is fixable though, you can break the ABI and address your issues. A lot of standard library defects are fixed in an unstable ABI mode they have, but that requires you to link it statically or dynamically and then ensure all your shared object dependencies are using the same exact version. It's not trivial for everyone, but many do this (usually the static version).
- VorpalWay 2mo ago
  Rust has committed to a stable API (but the ABI is explicitly unstable). Which makes sense for a systems language. It isn't (and doesn't want to be) a kitchen sink language. But even something like Python has lots of cruft in its standard library. And they are willing to make breaking changes. Nobody should use urllib.request for example, requests is a far better HTTP client library. To the point where the stdlib docs tell you so.
  - Filligree 2mo ago
    I use urllib.request. It works fine, it’s always available, and I don’t need to push it through an audit.
badsectoracula 2mo ago
> Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though. Well, then take the Lazarus / Free Pascal's approach and just put everything :-P. It isn't like code takes THAT much space. If you install Lazarus you get a ton of stuff out of the box, aside from the crossplatform WYSIWYG RAD IDE and desktop application framework you also get 2D graphics libraries (with a bunch of image i/o), networking libraries, (de)compression libraries, a webapp framework, database clients, parsers for json, xml, markdown, javascript and a bunch of other stuff (even a parser for the language itself), a TUI framework, bindings for a bunch of external libraries and other stuff. And all that stuff (or at least most of it) work on all the platforms the compiler supports. Yes, using FPC you can probably (didn't try) make a pretty markdown viewer with inline JPG and PNG display support that runs on Windows 3.1 :-P. Unfortunately some people are trying to break this and introduce online package management, but so far at least FPC and Lazarus comes out of the box with not just batteries included but an entire carton of batteries just in case :-P.
win311fwg 2mo ago
> Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though. It works for something like Go It, as you put it, works for Go because its designers took a hard stance and decided that it was a language for network systems and you're on your own if you want to make it do other things. Nobody needed to agree because it was already chosen for you. > For Rust, well I would like to prioritise features for embedded development, someone else might want game dev features (geometry and physics stuff), yet another person wants data science things. And so on. But does Rust need to be all things to all people? The Go ecosystem has a separate standard library under the Tinygo project for those who want to prioritize embedded development. Even if there was convergence on Rust as a language, it doesn't technically need a singular standard library. There can be a distribution for embedded developers, a distribution for game developers, etc.

ksbd-pls-finish 2mo ago

Well I use python daily for the past 10 years and I never did data science. Data science? Everyone knows python is the language of cyber security.

piker 2mo ago

Maybe that’s a good place to make the cut. One Rust crate for game dev, one for data science, etc. Then their deps are pinned and monitored by the crate maintainers.

barnabee 2mo ago

I wrote this on another thread recently, but my line for exclusion from standard library is a library that’s any one of: - not obviously/generally useful (i.e. useless or too specific/should be a program not a library) - obviously trivial (code it yourself when you need it/compose from other primitives) - already available (open source) elsewhere by a credible team that supports and maintains it Anything else… put it in the stdlib

Orphis 2mo ago

C++ ended up in that situation because they don't want to break backwards compatibility (ABI, API) or change contracts, except in some rare cases, even on major releases. Quite often, it is a vendor issue to break the ABI and fix issues, and some have refused to do that. It's a self-inflicted issue that most other languages with "batteries included" don't have since they will document breakage and upgrade paths when anything changes, or they are not impacted as much since they are using an intermediate language as interface and avoid most ABI issues. The implementation is fixable though, you can break the ABI and address your issues. A lot of standard library defects are fixed in an unstable ABI mode they have, but that requires you to link it statically or dynamically and then ensure all your shared object dependencies are using the same exact version. It's not trivial for everyone, but many do this (usually the static version).

VorpalWay 2mo ago
Rust has committed to a stable API (but the ABI is explicitly unstable). Which makes sense for a systems language. It isn't (and doesn't want to be) a kitchen sink language. But even something like Python has lots of cruft in its standard library. And they are willing to make breaking changes. Nobody should use urllib.request for example, requests is a far better HTTP client library. To the point where the stdlib docs tell you so.
- Filligree 2mo ago
  I use urllib.request. It works fine, it’s always available, and I don’t need to push it through an audit.

badsectoracula 2mo ago

> Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though. Well, then take the Lazarus / Free Pascal's approach and just put everything :-P. It isn't like code takes THAT much space. If you install Lazarus you get a ton of stuff out of the box, aside from the crossplatform WYSIWYG RAD IDE and desktop application framework you also get 2D graphics libraries (with a bunch of image i/o), networking libraries, (de)compression libraries, a webapp framework, database clients, parsers for json, xml, markdown, javascript and a bunch of other stuff (even a parser for the language itself), a TUI framework, bindings for a bunch of external libraries and other stuff. And all that stuff (or at least most of it) work on all the platforms the compiler supports. Yes, using FPC you can probably (didn't try) make a pretty markdown viewer with inline JPG and PNG display support that runs on Windows 3.1 :-P. Unfortunately some people are trying to break this and introduce online package management, but so far at least FPC and Lazarus comes out of the box with not just batteries included but an entire carton of batteries just in case :-P.

win311fwg 2mo ago

> Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though. It works for something like Go It, as you put it, works for Go because its designers took a hard stance and decided that it was a language for network systems and you're on your own if you want to make it do other things. Nobody needed to agree because it was already chosen for you. > For Rust, well I would like to prioritise features for embedded development, someone else might want game dev features (geometry and physics stuff), yet another person wants data science things. And so on. But does Rust need to be all things to all people? The Go ecosystem has a separate standard library under the Tinygo project for those who want to prioritize embedded development. Even if there was convergence on Rust as a language, it doesn't technically need a singular standard library. There can be a distribution for embedded developers, a distribution for game developers, etc.