Rust intentionally chooses to have a small standard library to avoid the "dead batteries" problem. But the Rust community also maintains lists of "blessed" crates to try and cope with the issue of having to trust third-party software components of unknown quality.
The downside of a small stdlib is the proliferation of options, and you suddenly discover(ed?, it's been a minute) that your async package written for Tokio won't work on async-std and so forth.
This has often been the case in Go too - until `log/slog` existed, lots of people chose a structured logger and made it part of their API, forcing it on everyone else.
It would be nice if folks linked crates up into ecosystems thst shared maintainers and guidelines. We don't need everyone using the same stuff, but I'd rather prefer to get 10 different dependences rather than 30. In c++ this plays out in libraries like absl, folly, boost and others. Fewer larger dependencies that bring in a mix of functionality.
I think having http in the standard library is a perfect example of the dead batteries problem: should the stdlib http also support QUIC and/or websockets? If you choose to include it, you've made stdlib include support for very specific use cases. If you choose not to include it, should the quic crate then extend or subsume the stdlib http implementation? If you choose subsume, you've created a dead battery. If you choose extend, you've created a maintenance nightmare by introducing a dependency between stdlib and an external crate.
Sorry but for most programming tasks I prefer having actual data containers with features than an HTTP library: Set, Tree, etc types. Those are fundamental CS building blocks yet are absent from the Go standard library. (well, they were added pretty recently, still nowhere near as featureful than std::collection in Rust).
Also, as mentioned by another comment, an HTTP or crypto library can become obsolete _fast_. What about HTTP3? What about post-quantum crypto? What about security fixes? The stdlib is tied to the language version, thus to a language release. Having such code independant allows is to evolve much faster, be leaner, and be more composable. So yes, the library is well maintained, but it's tied to the Go version.
Also, it enables breaking API changes if absolutely needed. I can name two precendents:
- in rust, time APIs in chrono had to be changed a few times, and the Rust maintainers were thankful it was not part of the stdlib, as it allowed massive changes
- otoh, in Go, it was found out that net.Ip has an absolutely atrocious design (it's just an alias for []byte). Tailscale wrote a replacement that's now in a subpackage in net, but the old net.Ip is set in stone. (https://tailscale.com/blog/netaddr-new-ip-type-for-go)
> Set, Tree, etc types. Those are fundamental CS building blocks
And if you're engaging in CS then Go is probably the last language you should be using. If however, what you're interested in doing is programming, the fundamental data structures there are arrays and hashmaps, which Go has built-in. Everything else is niche.
> Also, as mentioned by another comment, an HTTP or crypto library can become obsolete _fast_. What about HTTP3? What about post-quantum crypto? What about security fixes? The stdlib is tied to the language version, thus to a language release. Having such code independant allows is to evolve much faster, be leaner, and be more composable. So yes, the library is well maintained, but it's tied to the Go version.
The entire point is to have a well supported crypto library. Which Go does and it's always kept up to date. Including security fixes.
> - otoh, in Go, it was found out that net.Ip has an absolutely atrocious design (it's just an alias for []byte). Tailscale wrote a replacement that's now in a subpackage in net, but the old net.Ip is set in stone. (https://tailscale.com/blog/netaddr-new-ip-type-for-go)
Yes, and? This seems to me to be the perfect way to handle things - at all times there is a blessed high-quality library to use. As warts of its design get found out over time, a new version is worked on and released once every ~10 years.
A total mess of barely-supported libraries that the userbase is split over is just that - a mess.
