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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

I just glanced through the small number of open issues, and none seem like actual issues so much as potential improvements. The maintainer seems to still be around, and I've never found that a standard library is faster at merging improvements than third party libraries, rather the exact opposite (for good reason, the standard library needs to avoid breaking changes at nearly all costs).

While I think there are valid arguments in both directions for putting more things like this in std, I don't think "non-bug issues have been open for over a year" is one of them. The exact same is true of std.

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> the standard library needs to avoid breaking changes at nearly all costs

IIRC in Rust this is a little bit looser than elsewhere (let's say in C++) as the ABI is not stable. This allows improvements that change the internal structure of structs but not the API. As a counter example, in C++11 there was a breaking change that introduced a size field to std::list, making size() O(1) instead of O(n), breaking linkage between older and newer versions of C++ binaries. In Rust there is no such guarantee so changes like that could be introduced anytime.

Yes but everything is versioned so it's not like this will break any existing applications unless the user/owner explicitly upgrades (but then they should be ready for breakages).

The absence of versioning hell with Rust is one of the many things I love about Rust.

On the other hand it means you don't automatically get security fixes and have to manually set up CVE monitoring and rebuild your application every time a CVE appears.

Of course if it appears in an old version the author won't bother to backport the fix so you will have to bump the dependency to the latest, doing all the API changes that you didn't want to do.

Are we still talking about Rust or have we moved on to general grumbling about life?

Any language with an insufficient standard library and a need to import small modules in large numbers.

rust is one of them.

Yeah, I'd emphasize that moving something to the standard library doesn't magically solve maintenance issues. In fact if the community can't even maintain something then that's a strong argument for it not to be moved somewhere that's much harder to contribute to, whose maintainers have a lot else on their plate and where any API mistakes are for forever.

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