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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

That’s a really good way to stagnate imho. I’d rather have 10 sorting libraries that each specialize or make different trade-offs than one library that tries to do everything.

That said, you can still have a core set of “blessed” packages that serve the common needs.

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I don't see how creating a definitive sorting library is stagnation compared to having 10 mediocre libraries that are all missing some sort of critical functionality.

Your argument seems to be "just write good code instead of bad code". My argument is "the best way for good code to exist is to enable and support multiple options". Because if you have only one option and it's bad then you're screwed with no recourse. C++ and Python have, imho, many horrible API designs and we're stuck with them forever. This is stagnation.

Rust has a good standard library and also a large community of libraries. Sometimes those community libraries get promoted to std because they're strictly better. Sometimes the std version of hashmap is slow because std insists on using a crytographically secure hash when 99.99% of use cases would be better served with a less secure but faster hashing algorithm.

Like many things in life the ideal scenario is a benevolent dictator that only makes good choices. In practice the best way to get something good is to allow for multiple choices.

The problem with this argument is that JS also has many horrible API designs. That seem to be replaced by equally horrible API designs, just with a faster churn.

Meanwhile, the horrible C++ and Python API designs at least offer the needed functionality, even if the code looks ugly.

Forgive me for nitpicking your Rust example but you can define your own hashmap that inherits from the standard hashmap, and give it a different hash function. I have done it.

Right. I'd be very surprised if anyone looks at languages with strong standard libs and says "I wish they had the kind of sorting I can pull in from npm"

Because who is going to bother working on any packages if they risk rejection in the end? Have fun with your ______ package because it's never going to improve.

There’s plenty of languages with vast standard libraries and which also have 3rd party libraries that offer the same feature as something in stdlib but more enhanced against a specific metric.

You see it in Go, Python, .NET, etc.

Also Java and Kotlin.

A well designed JS standard library that also includes a set of protocols (interfaces) would make such a huge difference in QoL. It would also likely be the biggest contributor to reducing bundle sizes. The protocols (iterable, async iterable etc) will ensure that the rest of the ecosystem can also innovate and participate at a similar level of ergonomics by implementing them

> A well designed JS standard library

While I agree here, you also have to remember that additions to the JavaScript standard also increase the amount of time / effort for new browsers to enter the space.

The JavaScript standard (the web APIs, mainly) are already very complex, with Web Workers, Push Notifications, Media Streams, etc. that additions to it should be made cautiously -- once an API is implemented, it's there forever, so the bar for quality is much greater than that of some NPM library.

A JS standard library would be a drop in the bucket compared to the size and complexity of the DOM libraries and implementing a usably performant JS engine.

Yes it should be done carefully. There are also plenty of examples of how this can be done well, done by experienced engineers. For example, the Dart starndard library (https://dart.dev/libraries - core [1], collection [2] and async [3] in particular) is a very good model that would fit JS fairly well too (with some tweaks and removals)

[1]: https://api.dart.dev/stable/3.2.4/dart-core/dart-core-librar...

[2]: https://api.dart.dev/stable/3.2.4/dart-collection/dart-colle...

[3]: https://api.dart.dev/stable/3.2.4/dart-async/dart-async-libr...

> A JS standard library would be a drop in the bucket compared to the size and complexity of the DOM libraries and implementing a usably performant JS engine.

It's still a nonzero amount of complexity. I see a lot of "v8 is really hard to compete with" comments on here so this feels very pertinent to mention. You can't have it both ways.

> Yes it should be done carefully. There are also plenty of examples of how this can be done well, done by experienced engineers. For example, the Dart starndard library (https://dart.dev/libraries - core [1], collection [2] and async [3] in particular) is a very good model that would fit JS fairly well too (with some tweaks and removals) > > [1]: https://api.dart.dev/stable/3.2.4/dart-core/dart-core-librar...

This one, at least, looks somewhat inspired by JavaScript.

There's a difference between features that need to be implemented as part of the engine such as Web Workers and those that can be implemented as a library, such as sorting; the latter can be shared between implementations much easier.

If that standard library would be written in JS, a new browser (or rather a new JS engine being a part of the browser) could just use some existing implementation (a reference implementation maybe?), no need to reinvent the wheel in every part of the browser.

> If that standard library would be written in JS, a new browser (or rather a new JS engine being a part of the browser) could just use some existing implementation

That sounds great, but I'm doubtful of the simplicity behind this approach.

If my understanding is correct, v8 has transitioned to C++[0] and Torque[1] code to implement the standard library, as opposed to running hard-coded JavaScript on setting up a new context.

I suspect this decision was made as a performance optimization, as there would obviously be a non-zero cost to parsing arbitrary JavaScript. Therefore, I doubt a JavaScript-based standard library would be an acceptable solution here.

[0]: https://github.com/v8/v8/tree/main/src/runtime [1]: https://v8.dev/docs/torque-builtins -- As I understand it, Torque compiles to C++ at compile-time, which is then linked and compiled into the rest of v8[2]. [2]: https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/main/tools/torque/format-torqu...

Hasn't everyone pretty much given up on making a new (standards compliant) browsers after Microsoft gave up?

(Or are they still trying to make Servo viable?)

> Hasn't everyone pretty much given up on making a new (standards compliant) browsers after Microsoft gave up?

There's plenty of competition, even if the current projects are in a beta (or even alpha) state. Consider the LadyBird browser developed by SerenityOS, or Servo.

I don't know, I think "batteries included" standard libraries got a bad reputation because Python's standard library is so full of crap, so lots of people thought the whole idea was fundamentally bad. But I think the correct conclusion is just that Python's standard library is bad.

Go has a big standard library too and it's mostly very well designed, useful and avoids fragmentation.

I think a similar thing happened with compiler warnings and C/C++. The language is error prone so people want warnings but a lot of the warnings don't have good solutions (e.g. signedness mismatches) so people tend to ignore them. Also they aren't easy to control, e.g. from third party dependencies.

So some people got the idea that warnings are fundamentally wrong and e.g. Go doesn't have them. But my experience of Rust warnings is that they are totally fine if done right.

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