Demi Marie ObenourHow large should a standard library be?
I’m inclined to say “huge”, but I’m curious what others think. And my views are open to change here.
@alwayscurious I think the risk with huge standard libraries is that they grow stagnant and maintainers are stretched way too thin.
They can grow stagnant because there's a high cost to breaking changes, even in languages with no stability guarantees. And it's hard for third parties to compete with "good enough" if it's in the standard library.
Maintainers are stretched thin because it's not exactly the most glamorous job. So there are relatively few people with both the expertise and willingness to do it. In theory you can solve this with a company paying people a proper salary to maintain it. But in practice I think the tech industry doesn't value maintenance so it still ends up being understaffed.
@chrisdenton That is definitely a risk. Ensuring that parts of it are maintained as if they were third-party libraries could help.
Frederik Braun �@alwayscurious ginormous, preferably :)
@freddy How big is too big? Is “safe Vulkan API bindings” too much? What about “full GUI toolkit” or “building blocks for an OS kernel”?
@alwayscurious yeah, ok I have no idea. But more than what rust has for sure :)
@freddy I agree. If something has been stable for a few years and is widely used, it should probably be in std.
@alwayscurious ooooh good side project for the next pandemic. I could go through the python standard library and port everything I like to rust.
@freddy I’d start by redoing how futures are implemented.
@alwayscurious be realistic! try the impossible! (I won't. This is too far out for me :))