Comment by Galanwe
2 months ago
> The only downside is the stdlib being as fast-moving of a target as it is.
Ah that's an interesting take, my opinion is that the stdlib doesn't move fast enough.
In its current state it's pretty broken, most of the "process", "os" and "posix" modules are either straight up raising unreachable in normal scenarios, or simply badly designed. I would like the stdlib to be much more fast moving and fix all these issues, but I had the impression most work on it is frozen until 0.15 or 0.16, after incremental compilation is done.
You are right, the stdlib is not the highest priority right now. There are major improvements coming in 0.14 though. The new default allocator for example. I think the problem you describe can be solved by having more contributors focussing on the standard library. With the compiler, there are bottlenecks which make onboarding new people hard. This is a smaller problem in stdlib.
> I think the problem you describe can be solved by having more contributors focussing on the standard library.
I don't think so, my impression is that stdlib improvements are volontarily frozen for now, not because of a lack of contributors but because of a lack of clear plan as to what the stdlib should look like. There are a number of issues and PR of people willing to contribute to stdlib that are stalled.
That's not to say that's its bad per se, "we don't have a plan for now and don't want people to commit time for an unclear target" is a perfectly OK answer.