Guidelines and General Direction for Standard Library Proposals

[Eli Perelman]

> its NOT a low-level language for creating esoteric data-structures and
algorithms in academia that have little relevance to web-development.

Let's not get into the realm of opinion stated as fact. It also doesn't
make sense to say that some things are useful in Node.js but then deny
other things because they aren't useful for web development.

There's no reason JS can't be more low level, and I find that enabling some
of these low level standard libs would be beneficial, even for web
development. The reality is that JS is a language that exists in many
environments including the web, servers, and hardware/bare metal, where
package dependency considerations are real. Keep that in mind. :)

Thanks,

Eli Perelman

On Sun, Aug 6, 2017, 6:44 AM kai zhu <kaizhu256 at gmail.com> wrote:

> inline
>
> WeakReferences,
>
> -1 footgun most web-devs have no idea how to use correctly (including me)
>
> OGG manipulation,
>
> -0.5 slightly prefer it as an npm module
>
> MPEG manipulation,
>
> -0.5 slightly prefer it as an npm module
>
> builtin support for Kerberos,
>
> impartial
>
> Bzip2 bindings,
>
> -1 use nodejs child_process system calls to bzip2.  i don’t see any common
> use-case for bzip2 other than file-to-file operations which can be
> accomplished with shell-scripting.
>
> Zlib bindings,
>
> already a nodejs builtin
>
> configurable random number generation,
>
> -1 Math.random is good-enough for most use-cases.  for the
> normal-distribution use-case, its easy enough to write your own transform
> with sine/cosine.
>
> OpenSSL bindings,
>
> already a nodejs builtin
>
> simple hashing,
>
> +1 would be nice to have
>
> drivers for databases,
>
> +1 a STABLE nodejs sqlite3 builtin is sorely needed for embedded systems
> (instead of the flaky npm module), but need to nag nodejs folks, not tc39
>
> ImageMagick bindings,
>
> -1 use nodejs child_process system calls to imagemagick.  i'm skeptical
> builtin bindings would be significantly more efficient enough to be worth
> the effort.
>
> arbitrary precision math,
>
> -0.5 generally against due to it confusing people with 2 different numeric
> types, though i slightly sympathize with accounting/finance use-cases for
> decimal arithmetic.
>
> statistics support,
>
> +1 would be useful
>
> GPG support,
>
> impartial
>
> PostScript support,
>
> -1 use nodejs child_process system calls, as bindings would not be
> significantly more efficient.
>
> Judy Arrays,
>
> -1 too esoteric and confusing to understand what the use-cases are for
> most web-devs
>
> neural networks,
>
> -1 slightly too big a scope, and more the domain of wasm
>
> Lua integration,
>
> Impartial
>
> FTP support,
>
> -0.5 i don’t see much use-case for an ftp-client but i may be wrong
>
> XML support,
>
> impartial
>
> 9 data structures,
>
> -1 javascript is a high-level language with a builtin feature-set targeted
> for expressing high-level concepts like ajax, file-uploads, event-handling,
> dom-manipulations, programmable forward/reverse proxies, etc.  its NOT a
> low-level language for creating esoteric data-structures and algorithms in
> academia that have little relevance to web-development.
>
> recursive iterators
>
> javascript already has recursive closures that i frequently use like
> recursive iterators
>
>
> On Aug 6, 2017, at 5:40 PM, Michał Wadas <michalwadas at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I disagree.
> PHP have WeakReferences, OGG manipulation, MPEG manipulation, builtin
> support for Kerberos, Bzip2 bindings, Zlib bindings, configurable random
> number generation, OpenSSL bindings, simple hashing, drivers for databases,
> ImageMagick bindings, arbitrary precision math, statistics support, GPG
> support, PostScript support, Judy Arrays, neural networks, Lua integration,
> FTP support, XML support, 9 data structures, recursive iterators with well
> defined interfaces etc.
>
> All of them are missing in JavaScript. PHP have extremely bloated standard
> library - and JS have very minimal one.
>
> On Sun, Aug 6, 2017 at 4:32 AM, kai zhu <kaizhu256 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> my thoughts are the opposite. javascript (similar to perl and php)
>> already has a huge number of specialized builtin functions and methods
>> accumulated over its 20+ year evolution that pretty much solves every
>> practical problem encountered in frontend programming (and effectively
>> backend as well). the problem is a failure to educate new programmers on
>> how to use existing builtins to elegantly solve everyday problems, instead
>> of having them ignorantly reinvent things on their own.
>>
>> the mindset to writing javascript programs is more akin to writing perl
>> programs, e.g. "how do i leverage builtins to implement the requested
>> one-off UX feature using elegant perl-like one-liners", instead of "how do
>> i create extra abstractions, classes, and modules to implement this one-off
>> UX feature".
>> My thoughts: big source of JavaScript criticism is its small standard
>> library and community attempts to solve that issue - hundreds of small
>> modules. Significant part of lodash should be present in standard library.
>> My lodash selection - chunk, dropWhile, first, last, flatten, fromPairs,
>> pull, without, takeWhile, zip, flatMap, keyBy, property, groupBy,
>> partition, sample, shuffle, sortBy, ary, memoize, once, operators as
>> functions, clamp, inRange, get, mapKeys, mapValues, pickBy, many strings
>> operations, attempt, constant, flow, noop, range.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 5, 2017 at 1:22 PM, T.J. Crowder <
>> tj.crowder at farsightsoftware.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'd find it helpful to have:
>>>
>>> 1. A general steer from TC39 as to whether the committee are committed
>>> to a robust, feature-rich standard library, or a minimal one (with the
>>> expectation of a rich ecosystem of libraries, presumably).
>>>
>>> 2. Guidelines of what to consider when proposing standard library
>>> features.
>>>
>>> The latter can come from the community; the former needs to come from
>>> TC39.
>>>
>>> We see a fair number of simple lib function proposals on the list, it
>>> would be useful to have some guidelines for what's worth properly
>>> proposing and what's likely to be a non-starter.
>>>
>>> Naveen Chawla's [recent suggestion][1] is a good case in point: A
>>> standard lib function for taking an array (ideally, an iterable) and
>>> creating an object with properties referencing the elements by one of
>>> their property's values. (One could easily argue for a Set version as
>>> well.) Ignoring the details of his suggestion, this is a simple
>>> operation that I've needed in every codebase I've ever worked on. I
>>> haven't proposed it (having considered doing so repeatedly) because my
>>> perception had been that TC39 wants to keep the standard lib small.
>>> But with the additions in 2015, 2016, and 2017, is that simply not the
>>> case (anymore)?
>>>
>>> Apologies if either (1) or (2) already exist and I've overlooked them.
>>>
>>> -- T.J. Crowder
>>>
>>> [1]:
>>> https://esdiscuss.org/topic/array-prototype-toobjectbyproperty-element-element-property
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> es-discuss mailing list
>>> es-discuss at mozilla.org
>>> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
>>>
>>
>>
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