.NET has a _huge_ platform library and you know what? It’s a pleasure. So many things are just the standard way of doing things. When things are done weirdly, you can usually get a majority in favour of standardising it.
Yes, there’s always a couple of people who really push the boat out…
Yeah, IMO the small standard library in Rust is a big mistake, one of the few the language has made. When push comes to shove the stdlib is the only thing you can count on always being there. It's incredibly valuable to have more tools in the stdlib even if they aren't the best versions out there (for example, even if I normally use requests in Python urllib2 has saved my bacon before), and it doesn't hurt anything to have them there.
I don't think the situation is that comparable to python, since in python the library has to be present at runtime. And with the dysfunctional python packaging there's potentially a lot of grey hairs saved by not requiring anything beyond the stdlib.
With Rust, it's an issue at compile-time only. You can then copy the binary around without having to worry about which crates were needed to build it.
Of course, there is the question of trust and discoverability. Maybe Rust would be served by a larger stdlib, or some other mechanism of saying this is a collection of high-quality well maintained libraries, prefer these if applicable. Perhaps the thing the blog post author hints at would be a solution without having to bundle everything into the stdlib, we'll see.
But I'd be somewhat vary of shoveling a lot of stuff into stdlib, it's very hard to get rid of deprecated functionality. E.g. how many command-line argument parsers are there in the python stdlib? 3?
On the other hand, a worse implementation in the stdlib can make it harder for the community to crystalize the best third-party option since the stdlib solution doesn't have to "compete in the arena".
Go has some of these.
Maybe a good middle-ground is something like Rust's regex crate where the best third-party solution gets blessed into a first-party package, but it is still versioned separately from the language.
Non-system programmers like to trivialize choices of system programmers yet again. .NET is a GC platform running on a virtual machine. Bytecode compatibility and absolute performance are not that big of a deal on such platforms. You cannot / shouldn't run .NET on deeply embedded systems and bare metal where You want to strip as much standard library as possible and want as little magic in standard library as possible. In a language with big hosted system assumption this causes to runtime to be split and forces developers to define big API boundaries.
The use case of languages like Rust and C++ is that you can use the same compiler to write both bare-metal unhosted code (non-std for bootloaders, microcontrollers and kernels) and hosted code (uses std structures). As a system programmer that crosses the edge between two environments, I would like to share as much code as possible. Having a big standard library with hosted system assumption is a huge issue. In those cases you want the language works 99% the same and can use the same structs / libraries. Sometimes you also want to write non-std code on hosted environments for things like linkers.
Rust isn't even at the level of maturity of C yet in this regard. Rust's std / core is too big for really memory limited microcontrollers (<64 K space) and requires nasty hacks with weak ABI symbols to make things sane.
Having a huge baggage of std both causes issues like this for the users and also increases maintenance burden of the maintainers. Rust really wants to break its APIs as little as possible and small standard library is a great way to achieve that. C++ suffered a lot from this and it hampered its adoption for C codebases.
Some of these non-system programmers are ex-system programmers, coding since the mid-80's that foundly remember the days when C and C++ compilers had rich frameworks that would compete in features with what .NET and Java later came to be.
Unfortunelly too many modern system programmers never lived in that era, and are completly off on how nice the whole development experience could be like.
bigstrat2003|6 days ago
jabl|5 days ago
With Rust, it's an issue at compile-time only. You can then copy the binary around without having to worry about which crates were needed to build it.
Of course, there is the question of trust and discoverability. Maybe Rust would be served by a larger stdlib, or some other mechanism of saying this is a collection of high-quality well maintained libraries, prefer these if applicable. Perhaps the thing the blog post author hints at would be a solution without having to bundle everything into the stdlib, we'll see.
But I'd be somewhat vary of shoveling a lot of stuff into stdlib, it's very hard to get rid of deprecated functionality. E.g. how many command-line argument parsers are there in the python stdlib? 3?
hombre_fatal|5 days ago
Go has some of these.
Maybe a good middle-ground is something like Rust's regex crate where the best third-party solution gets blessed into a first-party package, but it is still versioned separately from the language.
okanat|5 days ago
The use case of languages like Rust and C++ is that you can use the same compiler to write both bare-metal unhosted code (non-std for bootloaders, microcontrollers and kernels) and hosted code (uses std structures). As a system programmer that crosses the edge between two environments, I would like to share as much code as possible. Having a big standard library with hosted system assumption is a huge issue. In those cases you want the language works 99% the same and can use the same structs / libraries. Sometimes you also want to write non-std code on hosted environments for things like linkers.
Rust isn't even at the level of maturity of C yet in this regard. Rust's std / core is too big for really memory limited microcontrollers (<64 K space) and requires nasty hacks with weak ABI symbols to make things sane.
Having a huge baggage of std both causes issues like this for the users and also increases maintenance burden of the maintainers. Rust really wants to break its APIs as little as possible and small standard library is a great way to achieve that. C++ suffered a lot from this and it hampered its adoption for C codebases.
pjmlp|4 days ago
Unfortunelly too many modern system programmers never lived in that era, and are completly off on how nice the whole development experience could be like.