Hi,
I'm in the process of adding a 'core' lib that will complement std in
the following fashion:
- core will be automatically 'use'd in any crate, unless you ask for
--no-core when running the compiler.
- everything in core will be automatically imported into the crate
you're building, again, unless you pass --no-core
The idea here is that some "library" code is so universal as to be not
worth burdening every user with writing "use std;" and -lstd with every
time they build a program, and that as libstd grows, the tension to "not
have to link or distribute libstd" for small/simple programs grows
stronger. Nobody wants a static-linked "hello world" to be 10mb.
The interesting question is: what are the criteria for something to be
in 'core' vs. 'std'? I've been thinking of the following criteria:
- If it's a module that relates 1:1 with a built-in tycon, it goes
in core. This means u8, u32, ..., str, vec, all go in core.
- If it's a module that relates 1:1 with a built-in runtime service,
it also goes in core. This means task, comm, os, fs, sys, dbg, rand,
unsafe, test, time, uv, run_program all go in core.
- If it's a module that covers a type we wind up using "in nearly
every nontrivial program", it goes in core. This means option,
either, result and extfmt go in core.
This is quite a bit of the stdlib, but not all. It leaves:
bitv, cmath, ctypes, c_vec, deque, ebml, four, fun_treemap, getopts,
json, list, map, net, rope, sha1, smallintmap, sort, tempfile, term,
treemap, tri, ufind, unicode, util
all in std. And as we add more stdlib stuff over time (I think I'd
prefer a big libstd -- see
https://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki/Standard-library-notes) we will be
making std larger, and core not-much-larger, possibly even smaller as we
reimplement rt stuff in rust code.
Are these agreeable criteria? Do you want fewer or more modules in core?
(Alternatively: Do you think this is a terrible idea? Do you want to
restart the conversation about large-vs-small libstd?)
-Graydon
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