> Something like Boost for C++, or Apache Commons for Java.
Honestly I wish Python worked this way too. The reason people use Requests so much is because urllib is so painful. Changes to a first-party standard library have to be very conservative, which ends up leaving stuff in place that nobody wants to use any more because they have higher standards now. It'd be better to keep the standard library to a minimum needed more or less just to make the REPL work, and have all of that be "builtin" the way that `sys` is; then have the rest available from the developers (including a default "full-fat" distribution), but in a few separately-obtainable pieces and independently versioned from the interpreter.
And possibly maintained by a third party like Boost, yeah. I don't know how important that is or isn't.
Honestly I wish Python worked this way too. The reason people use Requests so much is because urllib is so painful. Changes to a first-party standard library have to be very conservative, which ends up leaving stuff in place that nobody wants to use any more because they have higher standards now. It'd be better to keep the standard library to a minimum needed more or less just to make the REPL work, and have all of that be "builtin" the way that `sys` is; then have the rest available from the developers (including a default "full-fat" distribution), but in a few separately-obtainable pieces and independently versioned from the interpreter.
And possibly maintained by a third party like Boost, yeah. I don't know how important that is or isn't.