[nickik]

I dont know much about go, but I always thought that the problem with 'the standard library does everything' is that it starts to feel heavy and better alternatives pop up. Then you have these dark places in the library that most people avoid, and you cant really throw away.

Clojure used to have something called, clojure contrib and it was kind of awsome, it did pretty much everything in just one jar. It was also a huge problem to mentain and everybody wanted to be in contrib, so you had the one json lib in contrib and fasters outside.

With clojure 1.3 it got split up into many diffrent parts and it still servs as somewhat of a community standard or recommended library. Overall its much better and much more usful, but sometimes I miss the days when everything was in one jar on on dependency.

[cpeterso]

Rust is avoiding the contrib problem by shipping a robust package manager from the beginning and pushing much of the Rust stdlib (and language features) into libraries.

http://crates.io/

[cgag]

I started using Clojure just after 1.3 came out so I could be wrong, but my impression was that while contrib was all in one place, it was still maintained by a bunch of random people who got their code into contrib, rather than being treated as a core part of the language the way (I believe) Golang's is.

[nickik]

Yes it was, like I said it is better now. However it was also kind of nice because everything was just there. Even with good mantainers, some of the same problems could keep existing.

[coolsunglasses]

That's right. contrib was always the red-headed stepchild to core.