Comment by rhdunn
24 days ago
There are several issues with "Batteries Included" ecosystems (like Python, C#/.NET, and Java):
1. They are not going to include everything. This includes things like new file formats.
2. They are going to be out of date whenever a standard changes (HTML, etc.), application changes (e.g. SQLite/PostgreSQL/etc. for SQL/ORM bindings), or API changes (DirectX, Vulcan, etc.).
3. Things like data structures, graphics APIs, etc. will have performance characteristics that may be different to your use case.
4. They can't cover all nice use cases such as the different libraries and frameworks for creating games of different genres.
For example, Python's XML DOM implementation only implements a subset of XPath and doesn't support parsing HTML.
The fact that Python, Java, and .NET have large library ecosystems proves that even if you have a "Batteries Included" approach there will always be other things to add.
"Batteries included" means "ossification is guaranteed", yah. "stdlib is where code goes to die" is a fairly common phrase for a reason.
There's clearly merit to both sides, but personally I think a major underlying cause is that libraries are trusted. Obviously that doesn't match reality. We desperately need a permission system for libraries, it's far harder to sneak stuff in when doing so requires an "adds dangerous permission" change approval.
> "Batteries included" means "ossification is guaranteed", yah. "stdlib is where code goes to die" is a fairly common phrase for a reason.
Except I rather have ossified batteries that solve my problem, even if not as convinient as more modern alternatives, than not having them at all on a given platform.
Golang seems to do a good job of keeping the standard library up to date and clean
Largely, yes.
But also everyone sane avoids the built-in http client in any production setting because it has rather severe footguns and complicated (and limited) ability to control it. It can't be fixed in-place due to its API design... and there is no replacement at this point. The closest we got was adding some support for using a Context, with a rather obtuse API (which is now part of the footgunnery).
There's also a v2 of the json package because v1 is similarly full of footguns and lack of reasonable control. The list of quirks to maintain in v2's backport of v1's API in https://github.com/golang/go/issues/71497 (or a smaller overview here: https://go.dev/blog/jsonv2-exp) is quite large and generally very surprising to people. The good news here is that it actually is possible to upgrade v1 "in place" and share the code.
There's a rather large list of such things. And that's in a language that has been doing a relatively good job. In some languages you end up with Perl/Raku or Python 2/3 "it's nearly a different language and the ecosystem is split for many years" outcomes, but Go is nowhere near that.
Because this stuff is in the stdlib, it has taken several years to even discuss a concrete upgrade. For stuff that isn't, ecosystems generally shift rather quickly when a clearly-better library appears, in part because it's a (relatively) level playing field.
10 replies →
100% to libraries having permissions. If I'm using some code to say compute a hash of a byte array, it should not have access to say the filesystem nor network.
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The goal is not to cover everything, the goal is to cover 90% of the use cases.
For C#, I think they achieved that.
> They are going to be out of date whenever a standard changes (HTML, etc.)
You might want to elaborate on the "etc.", since HTML updates are glacial.
The HTML "Living Standard" is constantly updated [1-6].
The PNG spec [7] has been updated several times in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2025.
The XPath spec [8] has multiple versions: 1.0 (1999), 2.0 (2007), 3.0 (2014), and 3.1 (2017), with 4.0 in development.
The RDF spec [9] has multiple versions: 1.0 (2004), and 1.1 (2014). Plus the related specs and their associated versions.
The schema.org metadata standard [10] is under active development and is currently on version 30.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... (New)
[2] https://web.dev/baseline/2025 -- popover API, plain text content editable, etc.
[3] https://web.dev/baseline/2024 -- exclusive accordions, declarative shadow root DOM
[4] https://web.dev/baseline/2023 -- inert attribute, lazy loading iframes
[5] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... (Baseline 2023)
[6] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... (2020)
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
[10] https://schema.org/
please! nobody uses Xpath (coz json killed XML), it RDF (semantic web never happened, and one ever 10years is not fast), schema.org (again, nobody cares), PNG: no change in the last 26 years, not fast. the HTML "living standard" :D completely optional and hence not a standard but definition.
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glaciers change faster than HTML
because there is more human effort
Oof, I honestly hadn't considered that.
Why would they be out of date? The ecosystems themselves (for example .NET) receives regular updates.
Yes, they cannot include everything, but enough that you do not _need_ third party packages.
Python, .NET, and Java are not examples of batteries included.
Django and Spring
comparing to Node, .NET is batteries included: built-in Linq vs needing lodash external package, built-in Decimal vs decimal.js package, built-in model validation vs class-validator & class-transformer packages, built-in CSRF/XSRF protection vs csrf-csrf package, I can go on for a while...
And in fact wasn't a popular Python library just compromised very recently? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501426.
So Python's clearly not "batteries included" enough to avoid this kind of risk.
That's my point. You can have a large standard library like those languages I mentioned, but that isn't going to include everything nor cover every use case, so you'll have external libraries (via PyPi for Python, NuGet for .NET, and Maven for Java/JVM).
Python's standard library is definitely much more batteries-included than JavaScript's.
depends, JavaScript in the Browser has many useful things available, which I miss with python, e.g., fetch, which in Python you need a separate package like requests to avoid a clunky API. Java had this issue for long time as well, since Java 11 there is the HttpClient with a convenient API.