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Comment by martinald

4 hours ago

How is it surprising to people that zip and XML are in stdlibs for a programming language?

Btw, you should have looked at dotnet for this as well. There is a very good library ( DocumentFormat.OpenXml) that can handle all docx/xlsx/pptx files. And dotnet can ship standalone binaries (though AOT probably won't work).

Many runtimes/languages rely on third party deps for that. Also plenty of devs think the stdlib should be as lean as possible.

Personally, I think there should be a balance. The direct consequence of a barebones stdlib is NPM and having to download hundreds of dependencies for a hello world.

  • Golang has the golang.org/x packages, which avoids too much stdlib bloat while still providing the niceties of “pre-vetted” packages that don’t pull in a massive dependency tree.

Difficult to square the author's surprise with the later comment "I have my fair share of building a Java desktop application and know jpackage and alike very well"

You can't get very far in Java development without working with .jar files (which are zip archives).