> Rust code as much of th Rust standard library is simply not ready for "serious...

DrJokepu · on March 22, 2016

There is no way to select over a range of TcpStream objects. There is no stable way to select over a range of mpsc channels. There is no way to access a TcpStream in a non-blocking manner. There is no support whatsoever for UNIX signals. I could go on.

pcwalton · on March 22, 2016

I don't miss the things you mentioned very much, and I think it's an exaggeration to say that these things are what makes Rust's standard library not usable for anything serious. But anyway:

> There is no way to select over a range of TcpStream objects.

mio

> There is no stable way to select over a range of mpsc channels.

Yes, this is annoying. We should stabilize MPSC select. You can use BurntSushi's chan for now though.

> There is no way to access a TcpStream in a non-blocking manner.

mio basically supports this, no?

> There is no support whatsoever for UNIX signals.

Do many languages have good support for this? The C and C++ standard libraries don't; that's part of POSIX. Signals interact very badly with garbage collectors, so I can't imagine many languages have this.

DrJokepu · on March 22, 2016

Mio is not part of the standard library. Go, for example, has excellent support for UNIX signals.

pcwalton · on March 22, 2016

So I think our disagreement is semantic. When you say the Rust standard library is "unusable", you mean that you usually need Cargo packages in addition to what the standard library provides in order to write programs in Rust. That is true, but that's just a design difference between Rust and some other languages, like Go. For a systems language like Rust, I think that focusing on having an excellent package manager instead of having a super-comprehensive standard library was the right call. The standard library is very well designed for what it does (IMHO), and I credit the community-based library stabilization process for that.

As for Go and signals, I think it's pretty debatable as to whether you can have "excellent support" for signals without the ability to write a true signal handler. Note that this is not a fault of Go and is pretty much inherent to any garbage collected language. I suspect the Rust community would not be particularly happy with an implementation of signals that had hardwired sending to MPSC channels. Even having MPSC channels in the library at all is somewhat controversial...