The Python Language Summit 2023: What is the Standard Library for?

 Brett Cannon came to the Python Language Summit this year with a fundamental question for the assembled core developers: What is the standard library for?

According to a quick python -c "import sys; print(len(sys.stdlib_module_names))" call on my laptop, the standard library in Python 3.11 consists of 305 importable modules. Many of these are implementation details that, if you’re a good citizen, you really shouldn’t be importing – but the point stands that the Python standard library is perhaps now larger than it should be.

But the goal of his question, Cannon explained, wasn’t to decide which modules to get rid of. Instead, it was to create guidelines on when and why new modules should be accepted into the standard library.

“We need to audit the standard library, and not deprecate it, but decide which bits should probably not have been added if we had perfect hindsight. 

— Guido van Rossum, CPython Core Developer and former BDFL

Carol Willing agreed that the core dev team shouldn’t be looking to remove modules en masse, but should decide what kinds of modules they wanted to admit in the future. Łukasz Langa agreed, and pointed out that it was often hard removing modules even when we wanted to, due to the fact that “the standard library is a huge import cycle”.

Where do we go now?

Cannon himself put forward two possible answers to his question, before tossing it out to the audience:

1. The standard library should contain everything required to bootstrap an installer.
2. The standard library should make it easy for beginners to be able to write scripts without installing anything.

The conversation was free-flowing, but a common point of consensus among the attendees was that the standard library should focus on tools and utilities that allow users to write better Python code. Hynek Schlawack cited dataclasses as an example of a module that made writing classes much less painful, and generally led to them writing better code as a result. (Schlawack is the author of the attrs library, the third-party inspiration for dataclasses, which itself is still going strong.) Filipe Laíns agreed, arguing that the core dev team should focus on building business implementations for third-party libraries to build on top of.

“The default answer for ‘Should this be in the standard library?’ should be ‘No’, but we should bless smaller utilities that help people write better Python code” 

— Antonio Cuni, HPy Core Developer

There was a certain amount of regret in the air about modules that perhaps should never have been added to the standard library, and had proved themselves to be significant maintenance burdens in the years since, but could now never be removed. tkinter, it was universally agreed, was the primary example here; possibly multiprocessing also.

Guido van Rossum pondered whether asyncio should ever have been added to the standard library, remarking that it had been difficult to evolve asyncio while it was in the standard library, and had possibly been added before it was “fully baked”. The ssl integration had probably been a mistake, he said, and should have been left to third parties.

Łukasz Langa noted that modules such as asyncio and typing, which had continued to evolve rapidly after being added to the standard library, had helped spur new syntax changes to Python that had been to the language’s betterment. Without asyncio in the standard library, Langa argued, we would probably never have adopted the async/await syntax that is now the foundation of asynchronous Python programming.

Zac Hatfield-Dods, maintainer of several prominent third-party packages, said that different standard-library packages had different impacts on the Python ecosystem. Pytest, one of the libraries he maintains, had managed to flourish and find success despite the existence of unittest in the standard library. But another library he helps out with, the asynchronous Trio framework, had struggled to attract users while asyncio had been part of the standard library. “Nobody supports alternative async implementations,” he complained, despite Trio’s development often being years ahead of where asyncio is. (In the coffee break afterwards, Hatfield-Dods was keen to emphasise that he is, in fact, a fan of asyncio and the work of the asyncio maintainers.)

Zac Hatfield-Dods (left), speaking at the Language Summit (Photo by Hugo van Kemenade)

Cannon brought up the question of whether a module like pathlib belonged. “It’s just sugar,” he remarked – i.e., hardly a “core utility” or a protocol that allowed people to write better code. But it has nonetheless been one of the more popular additions to the standard library in recent years. Langa again pushed back, arguing that without the addition of pathlib to the standard library, we would never have added os.PathLike, a protocol that had allowed a common interface for describing file-system paths in Python. “A third-party PyPI package wouldn’t have convinced us to make that change,” Langa argued.

Several attendees noted that adding a module to the standard library often made it hard for users to use features added to the module in newer versions of Python, due to CPython’s slow development cycle. One solution could to provide third-party versions of standard-library modules on PyPI, backporting the latest features of a module to older versions of Python. Thomas Wouters argued that previous attempts at providing these backport modules had often been disastrous. However, Jelle Zijlstra noted that typing_extensions, which backports features from the latest version of the typing module, had been incredibly successful (though it was sometimes hard to maintain).

Overall, there was agreement that the original motivations for a large, “batteries-included” standard library no longer held up to scrutiny. “In the good old days,” Ned Deily reminisced, “We said ‘batteries-included’ because we didn’t have a good story for third-party installation.” But in 2023, installing third-party packages from PyPI is much easier.

Often, Thomas Wouters noted, people preferred using standard-library modules in a corporate setting due to the fact that the installation of any third-party package would require approval from their company’s IT department. But, he noted, this was hardly Python’s problem.

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