Zig's Minimalist Standard Library Approach Challenges C++ Status Quo

The Zig programming language is challenging conventional wisdom about standard libraries with its radical minimalism. While languages like C++ expand their standard libraries with each release, Zig actively removes components that fail to meet strict criteria, relocating them to community-maintained packages. This philosophy—enabled by Zig's first-class package manager—presents a compelling economic case for rethinking how programming languages manage core components.

The Zig Minimalism Playbook

Zig's standard library focuses exclusively on fundamental utilities: memory allocators, data structures, and cross-platform OS abstractions. High-level frameworks and domain-specific functionality are explicitly excluded. As community discussions reveal:

• In-memory operations belong
• File format handlers (tar, zip, JPEG) don't
• HTTP clients and similar frameworks are inappropriate

What makes Zig exceptional is its willingness to shrink. The language maintains an archived std-lib-orphanage repository where removed components live under MIT license. Examples include realpath() (removed due to portability issues) and filesystem API reorganizations. This contraction-first approach is nearly unheard of in language design.

The secret enabler? Zig's integrated package manager. When components leave the standard library, developers simply add a dependency. Without this ecosystem infrastructure, minimalism would be punitive rather than virtuous.

The Hidden Cost of C++'s Endless Expansion

C++ standardization exhibits dangerous economic asymmetry:

• Proposers pay a finite cost to add a feature
• The community pays perpetual costs forever

Every addition creates compounding obligations:

• Compiler vendors must implement and maintain it indefinitely
• Future proposals must analyze interactions with it
• Educators must decide whether to teach it
• ABI concerns constrain evolution

The result is what economists call an externality problem: Proposers capture prestige and canonical status while socializing diffuse, perpetual costs across the entire ecosystem. Historical examples prove instructive:

• std::regex: Performance issues frozen by ABI
• std::any: Rarely used vocabulary type
• std::filesystem: Encoding assumptions causing mojibake on Windows

Each seemed reasonable when proposed. Each now represents sunk costs with minimal benefit.

Institutional Inertia vs. Ecosystem Health

Samo Burja's Great Founder Theory explains why institutions decay: Living knowledge erodes through imperfect transmission. When std::filesystem creator Beman Dawes passed away, institutional knowledge vanished with him. Every library addition creates another tradition of knowledge that must be preserved.

Meanwhile, bureaucratic incentives favor expansion:

• No careers are built removing std::codecvt
• Careers are built proposing new additions

Zig demonstrates an alternative institutional posture—one where contraction constitutes progress. This requires what Burja calls a "live player"—authority figures willing to make decisions that bureaucratic processes resist.

Three Lessons for C++

1. Raise the inclusion bar: Standardize only components with proven stability and vocabulary necessity requiring type agreement for interoperability
2. Invest in ecosystem infrastructure: Committee bandwidth should prioritize core language evolution and dependency tooling over niche libraries
3. Normalize removal: Treat additions as potentially temporary. Components should periodically justify their inclusion

Countering Objections

The "C++ needs a large standard library" argument is circular—ecosystem stagnation perpetuates dependency on the standard. Meanwhile, standardization guarantees interface portability, not quality (std::regex is specified and slow). As for beginners? A smaller, coherent library with fewer pitfalls is more teachable than a vast minefield of exceptions.

The Path Forward

Zig's approach proves that minimalism works when paired with robust ecosystem tooling. While C++ can't replicate Zig's model overnight due to ABI constraints and legacy code, it can adopt the underlying philosophy: Every library proposal must rigorously justify why it belongs in the standard rather than the ecosystem. The committee's most valuable resource—collective expertise—is too scarce to spend maintaining regretted additions when critical language evolution awaits.

References:
Zig Language Reference
std-lib-orphanage Repository
Great Founder Theory