alt Hacker News> If you wrote a new Python program today that needed to make HTTP requests, would you rely on the stdlib, or would you pull in a dep?
For a short script, the standard "urllib.request" module [0] works pretty well, and is usually my first choice since it's always installed. For a larger program, I'll usually use a third-party module with more features/async support though, but I'll only do this if I'm using other third-party dependencies anyways.
> JS, Python, and Ruby, I have, quite a bit, and I have the sprawling requirements.txts and Gemfiles to prove it.
I checked the top 10 Go repositories on GitHub [1], and all but 1 of them have 30+ direct dependencies listed in their "go.mod" files (and many more indirect ones). Also, both C and JavaScript are well-known for their terrible standard libraries, yet out of all languages, JavaScript programs tend to use the most dependencies, while C programs tend to use the least. So I don't think that the number of dependencies that an average program in a given language uses says anything about the quality of that language's standard library.
Just claiming you'd use urllib is a concession. Yeah, I get it: for toy programs, you'd use the stdlib's HTTP.
That's not what happens in Golang.