Why the Standard Library

[Zachary Lund]

On Thursday, 19 January 2012 at 19:06:41 UTC, Alex Rønne 
Petersen wrote:
> On 19-01-2012 19:52, Zachary Lund wrote:
>> I've been wondering in the back of my mind for awhile now and 
>> it really
>> hasn't bothered me much but I figured I might as well get it 
>> off my mind.
>>
>> Why is there a need for a default "standard" library? I can 
>> understand
>> about some of the core stuff, but hell, even threads can be 
>> handled via
>> a 3rd party library. Why must Phobos or any library be a part 
>> of D itself?
>>
>> I'm unfamiliar with the reason for C++ having a standard 
>> library as well
>> (which I bring up when people bitch about poor design or 
>> something
>> similar which I usually get no viable or any answer at all). 
>> More of an
>> ignorant question probably but oh well...
>
> Without a standard library, interoperation between libraries 
> becomes a huge pain, because there's no standard 
> interface/design for various things such as threads, 
> containers, bigints, networking, file I/O, etc.
>
> Not to mention, if a standard library didn't exist, you'd have 
> to adapt your build system to whatever arbitrary amount of 
> libraries you need to use.

C++ has interoperability between containers and allocators which 
have done much good. However, they hardly have any libraries that 
force preferential design that doesn't require flexible 
implementation.

Things like bigint and networking are not based on optimized or 
flexible implementation but on ease of use. You generally choose 
a BigInt library that is the easiest to use, not the one that has 
the most flexibility when it comes to which implementation it 
uses or the one that is most optimized. Also, I'm not sure who 
would reuse the std.socket design. There are plenty of libraries 
that give a more robust and clean interface to sockets.

I don't mind robustness but I do not like being forced onto a 
preferential design (which doesn't require flexible 
implementation) simply because it is in the "standard". I do not 
think the etc.curl or std.bigint promote library 
interoperability. Thus, I do not think these modules belong in 
the library considered "standard".

Also, libraries aren't really that big of a pain to add to a 
build system. It's generally just a matter of finding where the 
library is. On Linux, this is simple. On Windows, it generally 
requires either environmental variable or user input. I don't see 
any way around this nor do I find putting everything into one 
glob of a library a solution.