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by drrotmos 505 days ago
Which may or may not be fine in a Go binary that runs on a modern desktop CPU, but what if your code is supposed to run on say an ESP32-C3 with a whopping 160 MHz RISC-V core, 400 KB of RAM and maybe 2 MB of XIP flash storage?

You could of course argue that that's why no-std exists in Rust, or that your compiler might optimize out the animated GIF routines, but personally, I'd argue that in this context, it is bloat, that - while it could occasionally be useful - it could just as easily be a third party library.
2 comments
jitl 505 days ago
It’s the same as in C, Rust, or any other programming language I’ve ever used. If you don’t use a library, it doesn’t end up linked in your executable. Don’t want to animate GIFs on your microcontroller, then you don’t write `import “image/gif”` in your source file.

For a microcontroller sized runtime, there’s https://tinygo.org/

I think the lack of strong standard library actually leads to more bloat in your program in the long run. Bloat is needing to deal with an ecosystem that has 4 competing packages for time, ending up with all 4 installed because other libraries you need didn’t agree, and then you need ancillary compatibility packages for converting between the different time packages.

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IshKebab 505 days ago
> It’s the same as in C, Rust, or any other programming language I’ve ever used. If you don’t use a library, it doesn’t end up linked in your executable.

I don't think that's true. If the standard library is pre-compiled, and it doesn't use `-ffunction-sections` etc. then I'm pretty sure you'll just get the whole thing.

There is experimental support for building Rust's standard library from source, but by default it is pre-compiled.

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XorNot 505 days ago
It's hardly the case that a good reason to not have a more complete standard library on the basis of having to do a tiny bit more work in a more special case to get binary sizes down.
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IshKebab 505 days ago
No I totally agree. IMO Rust should have a more complete standard library.
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chikere232 505 days ago
Does anyone use the full standard library for embedded targets? I've not seen it done in C, java has a special embedded edition, python has micro-python, rust seems to usually use no-std, but I might be wrong there.

It seems like a bad reason to constrain the regular standard library

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IshKebab 505 days ago
I have in the past, but most people don't.

E.g. for esp32 see https://docs.esp-rs.org/book/overview/using-the-standard-lib...

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