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Comment by a-french-anon | Hacker News Reader

> because it makes it easy to pull supporting libraries?

No, because it's used as an excuse for a lack of large(r) standard library. It's the equivalent of "the bazaar/free market will solve it!".

You basically end up with a R5RS level of fragmentation and cruft outside your pristine small language; something that the Scheme community decided is not fun and prompted the idea of R6RS/R7RS-large. Yeah, it's hard to make a good, large and useful stdlib, but punting it to the outside world isn't a proper long-term solution either.

It's really a combination of factors.

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Standard library omissions aren’t there just because.

For almost any functionality missing in the standard library, you could point to 2-3 popular crates that solve the problem in mutually exclusive ways, for different use cases.

Higher level languages like Go or Python can create “good enough” standard libraries, that are correct for 99% of users.

Rust is really no different than C or C++ in this regard. Sure, C++ has a bigger standard library. But half of it is “oh don’t use that because it has foot guns for this use case, everyone uses this other external library anyways”.

The one big exception here is probably async. The language needs a better way for library writers to code against a generic runtime implementation without forcing a specific runtime onto the consumer.

You're just elaborating on my use of the word "hard". Yes it is, and C++ is a good example of what not to do. Also, "good" is a spectrum, which means something a bit less shiny but standard is worth existing.

What R7RS-large is doing by standardizing stuff that was already discussed at length through SRFI seems like a good way.

From an external PoV, Clojure seem to be doing okay too.

And, what, because it's named `std` it'll be magically better? Languages with giant stdlibs routinely have modules rot away because code maintenance doesn't get any easier, like Python. There are plenty of crates on crates.io made by the Rust project developers, I trust the RustCrypto guys pretty much the same amount, and merging the two teams together wouldn't solve any problems.

> And, what, because it's named `std` it'll be magically better?

Who said that? It won't be better, but it'll be always here, stable, conservative and won't depend on something outside std. And it won't be stored on an uncurated supply attack vector like crates.io.

If you want to reach a Common Lisp level of stability, there's no 101 ways to go about it.

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