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by oblio 2962 days ago
Maybe after the community chooses a few “winners” the Rust devs could promote them as being “suggested” packages?

Also, some suggested metapackages/bundles wouldn’t hurt for newbies, like a set of crates for developing command line tools, for example.

Something like this: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/

2 comments

Why choose a winner?

What if a 'winner' today is a loser in a year? What if we come up with a new approach to solving a problem that requires a breaking change, or a new crate?

Would someone be inclined to try to improve the state of HTTP given a good enough version in std? Would we be ok with discouraging that sort of competitive approach?

To be honest, all I see are downsides to having a huge std lib. The benefit seems to be that there isn't an obvious, de facto choice for what crates to use. But I think that's a problem better solved by crates.io.

I tend to agree, but I also think that there's a little bit of nuance here. For one thing, I have definitely enjoyed using a large standard library...when I didn't have access to cargo or tools of similar quality.

My impression is that many of those who are asking for Rust's stdlib to grow are also/actually asking "please make it really easy for me to use these APIs that I care about," to which I would respond "it's OK, code can be easy to reuse even if it's not in the stdlib," "try cargo," and "crates.io needs to continue improving on discoverability."

EDIT: also, hi!

To make it into some industries it needs to also be easy to grab a snapshot of all the batteries and do mods and licensing checks/approvals before doing a network unconnected install. Running a crates clone may or may not make sense. For some cases grabby an image on a thumb drive or DVD and doing a standalone install on a single machine makes sense.
Hiiii.

I think we're likely on the same page. The desire to make writing an HTTP server that much easier by providing a quick-to-use solution is entirely reasonable.

I just don't believe the solution is some 'sanctioned', permanent addition to std.

Better to be solved in crates.io.

Perhaps a better idea might be to include the most popular client in some form of official tutorial / guide / documentation, or as part of some extended documentation separate to the language doc?

That way libraries can coexist, but new developers have a single doc location to go to to find really common usages.

This is a strategy we’re pursuing but haven’t shipped yet https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust-cookbook
You misread what I said. Click my link and tell me what you see. Hint: there’s a reason those things are called “suggested extensions”.
It depends, the team suggested this kind of thing two years ago, and the community pretty resoundingly rejected the idea.
And the community does (organically) pick defacto winners. Like chrono, serde and rust csv (well, I'm not sure about rust csv).

It might be nice to have autogenerated docs about the most used soltuions, but I guess the rust cook book sort of fills that niche.