Comment by Ygg2
2 months ago
> Standard libraries should include everything needed to interact with modern systems.
So, databases? Which then begs the question, which - Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, MS SQL, etc.? And some NoSQL, because modern systems might need it.
That basically means you need to pull in everything and the kitchen sink. And freeze it in time (because of backwards compatibility). HTML, HTTP parsing, and SHA1024 are perfectly reasonable now; wait two decades, and they might be as antiquated as XML.
So what your language designers end up, is having to work on XML parsing, HTTP, JSON libraries rather than designing a language.
If JS way is madness, having everything available is another form of madness.
It is not madness. Java is a good example of rich and modular standard library. Some components of it are eventually deprecated and removed (e.g. Applets) and this process takes long enough. Its standard library does include good crypto and http client, database abstraction API (JDBC) which is implemented by database drivers etc.
Yeah, and Java was always corporately funded, and to my knowledge no one really used neither the http client nor the XML parser. You basically have a collection of dead weight libs, that people have to begrudgingly maintain.
Granted some (JDBC) more useful than the others. Although JDBC is more of an API and less of a library.
HttpClient is relatively new and getting HTTP/3 support next spring, so it’s certainly not falling into the dead weight category. You are probably confusing it with an older version from Java 1.1/1.4.
As for XML, JAXP was a common way to deal with it. Yes, there’s Xstream etc, but it doesn’t mean any of standard XML APIs are obsolete.
My favourite is java.awt.Robot