Ask YC: What are the libraries you couldn't live without? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: What are the libraries you couldn't live without?

6 pointswatmough11 comments

What are the libraries, that you currently couldn't live without?

You can assume that you have the base c library, and the STL h files.

The public library. Also the libraries of my local universities are cool, as they also admit strangers.

I have a lot of my own stuff that uses sqlite. One day I learned that I could not indeed live (or at least boot) without it. It probably qualifies as one of the dumber things I've done - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115577

What happened was I knew OSX came with sqlite3 but I didn't know some OSX system applications rely on it.

So one time I renamed the system's libsqlite3.dylib in order to debug a dyld problem and forgot to put it back. A few hours later I discovered my laptop wouldn't boot. Luckily I remembered what I did and was able to boot single-user and fix things.

Ahhh, does it underly CoreData?

If it does, I may finally get round to investigating CoreData, providing I can overcome my reluctance to use anything that isn't fully cross-platform.

The Queens Library at University of Bristol. So many stacks full of engineering knowledge..

It would be nice if you guys specified what language/platform the library is for.

I'm a big fan of the .NET reflection assemblies. How did I ever live without reflection?

Well, I was trying to leave it open so people could write interesting things about what they know.

I never would have thought this a couple of years ago, but I would now be very happy to locked-in to a JVM platform, and my chosen libraries would be Swing and a pure-Java Oracle JDBC.

I'm pretty sure I could make a good living using only that platform, plus Scala, or Clojure, or maybe even Java iteself, though it's always seemed a bit verbose if you write like the books tell you.

if you're working with python and images, the Python Imaging Library is a must-have

Are you asking specifically about C libraries or any library in general?

Any libraries. It doesn't have to be C based.

For instance, I wouldn't be able to live without my Oracle JDBC libraries.

If I had to take a programming language on a deserted language I would just take Python, Emacs and IPython. I can't think of any single Python library that I just can't live without. If I have to I will rewrite anything not part of the standard.

BeautifulSoup is amazing. Django is as well (if that counts)

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