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Better Batteries

13 pointsby olexsmirtoday at 7:48 AM9 commentsview on HN

Comments

nicoburnstoday at 11:35 AM

Currently we generally have a trade-off between:

- The standard library, which is both trusted/blessed and perma-stable

- A package ecosystem which is neither

I would love to see more exploration of the space in between:

- An extended stdlib which ships versioned libraries which use semver rather than being perma-stable.

- Better support for managing verification and assurance of package ecosystems.

aarroyoctoday at 11:40 AM

Yes! I've never been against languages with batteries included. In fact nowadays I prefer them. It's one of my biggest issues with Rust, but the problem also exists in Haskell. Funnily enough, in Node.js, which gave birth to npm, you can now do many stuff without external dependencies (last one I've seen are the sqlite functions).

But yes, in languages with batteries included sometimes they feel like an afterthought. It's not just Python. Java also used to have a big standard library, with many useful things including GUI programming which has been neglected a little bit.

Levitatingtoday at 11:39 AM

> it seems that the reason for Rust not having an API to get a stream of random bytes from the OS

This is already in nightly[1]. I don't see what "getting money in peoples pockets" has to do with its stabilization.

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/random/trait.Rng.html#tymethod...

show 2 replies
karlsefnitoday at 10:33 AM

I was fully expecting a comparison of recent battery chemistries, and forgot the "batteries included" saying being used for programming.

As someone who doesn't use the mentioned languages often, it's surprising to hear that Python's stdlib is inconsistent given how old it is / how much work has probably gone into it.