alt Hacker NewsHow about designing a "proper" standard library for Rust (comparable to Java's or CommonLISP's), to ensure a richer experience, avoiding dependency explosions, and also to ensure things are written in a uniform interface style? Is that something the Rust folks are considering or actively working on?
EDIT: nobody is helped by 46 regex libraries, none of which implements Unicode fully, for example (not an example taken from the Rust community).
Replies
tormeh • 10/11/2024
Just use the rust-lang org's regex crate. It's fascinating that you managed to pick one of like 3 high-level use-cases that are covered by official rust-lang crates.
The particular mode of distribution of code as a traditional standard library has downsides:
- it's inevitably going to accumulate mistakes/obsolete/deprecated stuff over time, because there can be only one version of it, and it needs to be backwards compatible.
- it makes porting the language to new platforms harder, since there's more stuff promised to work as standard.
- to reduce risk of having the above problems, stdlib usually sticks to basic lowest-common-denominator APIs, lagging behind the state of the art, creating a dilemma between using standard impl vs better but 3rd party impls (and large programs end up with both)
- with a one-size-fits-all it's easy to add bloat from unnecessary features. Not all programs want to embed megabytes of Unicode metadata for a regex.
The goal of having common trustworthy code can be achieved in many other ways, such as having (de-facto) standard individual dependencies to choose from. Packages that aren't built-in can be versioned independently, and included only when necessary.