[steveklabnik]

In the Ruby world, very few people use the standard library because it's got so many flaws, and they can't be fixed. So you end up with Nokogiri rather than REXML, all the various HTTP libs rather than net/*, etc. So it just ends up being bytes sent over the wire, wasting disk and bandwidth...

[saysjonathan]

I wonder if identifying the atomic aspects of what you intend your language to be used for ultimately helps in narrowing down what should be in std lib.

Go prioritizes network programming and bundles the necessary components, like http & rpc servers and json.

The http libraries are extensible enough to allow for customization where it's wanted (like http mux) while still creating a canonical implementation that'a still viable.

Has Rust identified the core demographics of who they're targeting in order to provide the most applicable platform? Is the target everyone and all application type, therefore there is no default platform?

Edit: To put it another way, is there a set of packages that is either necessary for rust, rust development, or most development in rust? If std lib includes everything necessary, then who are you targeting with the default platform?

[steveklabnik]

  > Has Rust identified the core demographics of who they're targeting
  > in order to provide the most applicable platform? Is the target
  > everyone and all application type, therefore there is no default platform?

Our target audience is still a bit too broad; "systems programming" can mean a lot of things. Application developers build a _lot_ of different applications, those who embed Rust in other languages have different set of requirements, OS/embedded devs have another. There's a lot of stuff in common, but there's also significant differences.

[skybrian]

Well, the trick is to actually get it right before standardizing it - much easier said than done. Keeping the standard library small helps with that since the bar is higher.

[pcwalton]

> Well, the trick is to actually get it right before standardizing it - much easier said than done.

And that's what we're doing.

> Keeping the standard library small helps with that since the bar is higher.

But weren't you just advocating for a large standard library?

[skybrian]

I guess I didn't understand what was meant by "where code goes to die". Graduation != dying.

[anamoulous]

I wouldn't say very few people use the standard library?

CSV, logger, json, fileutils, tempfile, pp, and on and on are used all the time...

[steveklabnik]

There are some parts that are good, and some parts that are bad, for sure.