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> Literally 30 seconds

And knowing the magic keyword search `adix` to arrive at a prerelease library that you yourself wrote. That not's exactly an endorsement for discoverability. Unless I'm missing something, Nimble is essentially stateless. You have no sense of how many times or how recently a library has been downloaded. These are important proxies.

> There has never been much prog.lang. benefit from being "in the stdlib/core" in Nim (unlike Python or Go, say) … more batteries core distribution is valuable - just less than you might guess

You've been around the community a lot longer than I have. Don't you find this strange? What top 10 language has as weak of a std lib as Nim? [Status all but says](https://status-im.github.io/nim-style-guide/libraries.std.ht...) don't use it.

> practically that needs delegation.

Yeah, I don't think this is the community's strong suit. It strikes me that Araq is tired of explaining himself (but doesn't care to consolidate discussion into ADRs), so when a well-meaning, would be contributor like the parent-poster comes along they get shot down and we lose them.

I only said anything at all because the implication was not "missing minor nits about whatever your favorite proxy for 'will rely' is" but rather "nothing at all". FWIW, the keyword was "index" and the result was adix, and I only meant the package system & "a" directory were discoverable. Exact keyword search systems indeed make discovery harder, but that is some whole other complaint. There are always many complaints.

There are a million ways to define both "top 10 language" and "weak std lib", but the C stdlib is not great and C++'s was bad enough to spawn Boost. And I'm sure many firms all but say "do not use" parts of many top10 stdlibs. In any event, we don't disagree that Nim's stdlib being stronger would be better or that poor delegation or unconsolidated discussion are problems. We disagree on very little, including I'm sure that there is more to a PLang than its stdlib.

What is present/missing in any stdlib (or really in almost anything period) is also often much more subtle and subjective than simple sales pitches one hears. To be concrete, there are "useful" (to someone) things in the Nim stdlib not in either Python's or Go's like std/critbits, std/pegs, ropes, packedsets, intsets, editdistance, etc. Nim stdlib substring search behind "xyz".find() is layered to let you, if you want, pre-build a `SkipTable` (the way regex engines let you pre-"compile" regexes). Subtle in diversity of both kind and granularity and subjective as in "who cares?"

Yes, all that and more is all available in all the ecosystems of anything "popular", but that brings you back to "trust proxies", like "prerelease" numbers, a very weak one, IMO. E.g., I have never used a neovim with a version >0.13, but it's been a trooper; one man's 0.7 is another's 7.0. TRUST IS TRICKY! A count of distinct reliers for some values of "distinct" and "rely" or various update patterns would be better (have their own issues, of course, but at least measures "company" as in "what misery loves", LOL).