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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

I don't follow Java development, but I have worked in it occasionally, and every time I do something in it, I'm inevitably surprised by having to use one of this commons libraries for something basic.

Is there a reason some of this stuff isn't added to the base framework?

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- Java has historically included things in its standard library that (presumably) everyone regrets nowadays, like CORBA support. The standard JRE is already overweight. Also keep in mind that size matters for Java - in theory, it's a client side environment that's downloaded and installed by consumers (of course, in practice nobody does that anymore).

- The standard library has to be implemented by all JVM vendors, so adding lots of stuff to it that can also easily be shipped as a library creates a lot of unnecessary effort.

- Changes to the Java standard library have to go through a committee process (JCP); again, it's probably just not worth the effort.

Bear in mind the in-progress modularity JSR (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=294) that might help this problem. Also, some people won't want everything that Guava provides.

The important algorithms are in the core library. This is a more friendly API to use both collections and operations on them. And while I love what Guava brings to the table, I do not agree with bringing API candy into base Java. When it comes to heavily used things like collections, this is obviously a gray area. My preference is that they obsolete the need for several of these things at the grammar-level with list/map syntax and [real] closures.

A lot of the most useful stuff in Guava is coming in JDK8 - most of the collection/functional APIs. Still, I'm surprised by your observation. What are you coming from that has a more comprehensive standard library? All I can think of is possibly .NET.

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