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Jan 16, 2018 at 22:11
As a developer, what affects your reaction to new libraries or tools? When do you react "ooh, this is new and neat!" and when do respond "argh, this is new and different"?

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Jan 22, 2026 at 20:11
10
The vast majority of libraries have a single maintainer. Even if you weight by downloads, roughly half of downloaded libraries have a single maintainer too.
Open Source is one person
Open Source is one person
The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting. But anyway, let’s look at some receipts. If you’re not real smrt, it seems like pointing out an open source project is written by one person in a country you don’t like is a bad thing. It could be. But it also could be the software running THE WHOLE F*CKING PLANET is written by one person. In a country. But we have no idea which country. It’s not the same person mind you, but it’s one person.
Jan 15, 2026 at 20:06
2
My default assumption is that external libraries are better than what I (or an LLM) would write in a v1. The extra effort to publish a project generally signifies that the author has spent a good amount of time on the problem. I end up prompting LLMs to prefer external code.
Jul 6, 2024 at 07:09
Coming from JS or Python, imports in Rust feel weird. They're entirely optional aliases for fully qualified symbols, which are always available. I don't know of many other languages where you can just start using libraries. Java is the only one I can think of.