What should and shouldn't be included in a standard library? [closed]

Question

What do you consider to be important features to include in the standard library of a general-purpose programming language? Should it have GUI toolkits and other such larger things? Are cryptography, networking, regular expressions, database integration and XML parsing supposed to be found as features in a standard library?

Do you prefer a small standard library as found in C and then eventually filling in the gaps using 3rd party libraries (or even implementing most features yourself) or do you want the kind of massive standard library which Java has? Something in-between?

Basically, what should and shouldn't be found in a standard library?

Answer 1

A general purpose language is hopefully suited for a wide variety of uses. A standard library for such a language should be just as flexible. Ideally it should be both large AND small.

A general purpose language has to be able to do just about anything, so it should have library support for just about anything, including the items you mentioned: graphics, networking, regex, databases, and the kitchen sink.

However (especially today), the language should be usable in large or small (think mobile/embedded) environments. Therefore the library should be modular, with a very small core (like the clib) and higher level modules that can be included or excluded by an environment's runtime.

In short, my answer to your question "what should and shouldn't be found in a standard library?" for a general language is: Everything that a general-purpose programmer needs. And it should be flexible enough for that definition to change over time.

Answer 2

Big standard libraries have some advantages. There is a uniform way of doing things, so there is a lot of documentation and examples available for it. Big libraries usually also means consistency, you know where to expect certain implementations.

Therefore I believe standard libraries should be big, rather than small. Especially with entire frameworks like Java and .NET which are reused by so many applications. You only have to install it once, so you don't even have the 'disadvantage' of wasted diskspace when certain features of the library aren't used.

Answer 3

It really depends on the philosophy of the language. For example, Python's philosophy is that there should be one way to do everything, so it makes sense that the standard library would be large.

Answer 4

Smaller libraries were probably important a few decades ago because of the smaller amount of memory available then. With memory sizes increasing exponentially, and other advanced features in runtime(like dynamic loading), bigger libraries make more sense. However, portability and efficiency may become concerns with some kind of libraries (e.g. graphics etc.).

On the whole, I would prefer bigger libraries, simply because they make life much easier for everybody.

As to what should be present, it should be enough to follow the 90-10 rule. Include the 10% most popular libraries that 90% people need. For the rest 10%, people may rely on external libraries or use other frameworks(MATLAB for engineers etc.).

Answer 5

Language's standard library should contain everything you (as language's developer) have

• Time
• Resources
• Willpower
• Knowledge

to

• Develop
• Debug
• Test
• Document
• Support

This is why it takes 50 MS employees to change a lightbulb and why many open languages have terrible standard library.

Answer 6

What should be included? Obviously, whatever is considered standard in the dev communities at the time of release.