Author: Steve Dower
Created at: 2025-11-20 15:17
Number: 161
Clean content: James Webber: While I think some view that as an end goal, a PEP to allow Rust extensions in the stdlib still stands on its own merit–there should be a formal decision whether to allow that expansion. Sure, but as I said in the rest of my post, that “formal decision” is really “can we let some people be lacking certain stdlib modules”. The choice of language is fairly orthogonal, since it isn’t going to affect the design of the runtime at all - we might as well bundle up C++ extension modules in the same PEP, since a similar number of users will be unable to use those, and some extension modules would benefit. Also, there’s only a small gap between “the stdlib may not have this module for you” and “if you want this module, choose to add it”. The latter is already possible with whatever language you want to use, so with the re-scoped proposal, we’re only slightly reframing things from the latter to the former. Once we’re officially okay with “the library is (core modules) plus (optional modules) plus (whatever your distro adds) plus (whatever you’ve installed)”, [1] then “optional modules” could be anything from anywhere (which means it’s really easy to say “yes, they could use Rust”). For explicitness, the current situation is “the library is (core modules) plus (whatever your distro adds) plus (whatever you’ve installed)”. The only thing we’re adding here is “optional modules”. ↩︎
