There are certainly a lot of libraries on crates.io, but I’ve noticed more projects in that ecosystem are willing to push back and resist importing unproven crates for smaller tasks. Most imported crates seem to me to be for bigger functionality that would be otherwise tedious to maintain, not something like “is this variable an array”.
(Note that I’m not saying Rust and Cargo are completely immune to the issue here)
Not Java, thankfully! Libraries containing 1-2 trivial classes do exist, but they're an exception rather than a rule. Might be that the process of publishing to Maven Central is just convoluted enough to deter the kinds of people who would publish such libraries.
Very true... I'm more experienced with .Net, but usually when you bring in something, it's much more of a compositional library or framework for doing something... like a testing harness (XUnit), web framework (FastEndpoints), etc. No so much in terms of basic utilities, where the std library and extensions for LINQ cover a lot of ground, even if you aren't using LINQ expressions themselves.
The difference, at least in languages like Java or Python, is that there is a pretty strong "standard" library that ships with the language, and which one can assume will be kept up-to-date. It is very hard to assume that for NPM or Rust or any other crowd-sourced library system.
Rust is an interesting case to me.
There are certainly a lot of libraries on crates.io, but I’ve noticed more projects in that ecosystem are willing to push back and resist importing unproven crates for smaller tasks. Most imported crates seem to me to be for bigger functionality that would be otherwise tedious to maintain, not something like “is this variable an array”.
(Note that I’m not saying Rust and Cargo are completely immune to the issue here)
Not Java, thankfully! Libraries containing 1-2 trivial classes do exist, but they're an exception rather than a rule. Might be that the process of publishing to Maven Central is just convoluted enough to deter the kinds of people who would publish such libraries.
Also because Java, .NET, etc. all have very expansive standard libraries. You don't need to import most stuff, as it's already built-in.
Very true... I'm more experienced with .Net, but usually when you bring in something, it's much more of a compositional library or framework for doing something... like a testing harness (XUnit), web framework (FastEndpoints), etc. No so much in terms of basic utilities, where the std library and extensions for LINQ cover a lot of ground, even if you aren't using LINQ expressions themselves.
But then you depend on Microsoft for everything. I prefer python where it's battery Included but you depend on a foundation
3 replies →
I mean, Apache Commons are still widely used. But it's just a handful of libraries maintaned by one organisation.
The difference, at least in languages like Java or Python, is that there is a pretty strong "standard" library that ships with the language, and which one can assume will be kept up-to-date. It is very hard to assume that for NPM or Rust or any other crowd-sourced library system.