[Caml-list] We need a rich standard library distributed with OCaml, really

[Hongbo Zhang <bobzhang1988@gmail.com>]

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Dear OCaml developers,
    I would like to spend one hour in writing down my experience that why I had to write some small utilities again and again, since this happened so many times that I believe you might come across such issues before.
    I am doing some compiler hacking tonight, I needed a utility function “String.split” which split a string into a list of strings by whitespace, it is just one liner if you use str library. However, since I am doing some low level stuff, I would try to avoid such big dependency, and I am pretty sure that I have ever written it  for at least three times, I just hoped that I could get it done quickly, so I am looking into batteries that if I can steal some code, I have to copy some code instead of depend on batteries, batteries is too big for my projects. `BatString.nsplit` seems to fit for what I needed, I copied the definition of `BatString.nsplit` into REPL, no luck, it depends on some previously defined functions, then I copied the whole module `BatString` into REPL, still no luck, it depended on another module `BatReturn`, then I stopped here, it’s time to write my own ad-hoc thrown-away `String.split` function again.
   OCaml is my favorite programming language, and I am very productive at it, however, I was annoyed by such things from time to time. We do have four *standard libraries* alternatives: batteries, core, extlib and ocaml-containers. In my opinion, none of them matches the beauty of the OCaml language itself and probably will never catch up if we don’t do anything. 
    Note that I don’t want to be offensive to any of these libraries, just my personal feedback that why I think it is not a good standard library, I appreciated a lot to people who contribute their precious time in maintaining these libraries, better than nothing : )
    - Batteries(extlib)
      It’s big with dependencies between different modules (OCaml does not have a good story in dead code elimination), some of its modules are of low quality, for example, batEnum is used everywhere while its implementation is buggy. batIO makes things even worse since it is not compatible with standard library, some type signatures mismatched IIRC.
    - ocaml-containers
      Mostly one man’s project
    - core
      I believe core has high quality, however, it suffers the same problem as batteries, a big dependency. There is a blocking issue, its development process is opaque, for an open source community, I would prefer a standard library developed in an open environment. 
    I am not expecting that we could have a  standard library as rich as python, but for some utilities, I do believe that shipped with standard library or officially supported is the best solution.
   Thanks — Hongbo 

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