Which libraries are indispensable?

Question

If you moved to a new programming language, which libraries do you feel must be supported if you're to keep using the language?

I am interested in both specific libraries (eg, bindings for libXYZ should exist) and categories (eg, a regular expression library should exist).

As an extension to this, what are the deal breaker features or design decisions (language level or library level) that would persuade you to switch to another language or to ignore it? Does your current main language support these well? How could they be improved upon?

I am interested to hear what people find most important for their choice of programming language besides syntax, platform support, efficiency and paradigm.

Answer 1

String handling is still essential today. So either the language or the standard library should have a nice set of string handling features.

Answer 2

It wasn't that important a few decades ago, but support for networking is very important.

At the very least high-level stuff like HTTP.

Answer 3

A Strong xUnit-like library.

Webservice support

XML Processing

A database connectivity library

A Networking library

A threading library

A File IO library

In terms of frameworks:

A Rich GUI library

An AJAX library

An application server.

Answer 4

Things that I use all the time is only the basic stuff like collections, network and I/O stuff. And I would expect that language to support it directly not by adding a library to it.

Answer 5

A solid Math library helps quite a bit.

Answer 6

• Regular expressions
• Logging & other diagnostics
• Cryptography
• Collections (lists/maps/stacks/etc)