

Ask YC: What are the libraries you couldn't live without? - watmough

What are the libraries, that you currently couldn't live without?<p>You can assume that you have the base c library, and the STL h files.
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Tichy
The public library. Also the libraries of my local universities are cool, as
they also admit strangers.

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bayareaguy
I have a lot of my own stuff that uses sqlite. One day I learned that I could
not indeed live (or at least boot) without it. It probably qualifies as one of
the dumber things I've done - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115577>

What happened was I knew OSX came with sqlite3 but I didn't know some OSX
system applications rely on it.

So one time I renamed the system's libsqlite3.dylib in order to debug a dyld
problem and forgot to put it back. A few hours later I discovered my laptop
wouldn't boot. Luckily I remembered what I did and was able to boot single-
user and fix things.

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watmough
Ahhh, does it underly CoreData?

If it does, I may finally get round to investigating CoreData, providing I can
overcome my reluctance to use anything that isn't fully cross-platform.

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danw
The Queens Library at University of Bristol. So many stacks full of
engineering knowledge..

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Rickasaurus
It would be nice if you guys specified what language/platform the library is
for.

I'm a big fan of the .NET reflection assemblies. How did I ever live without
reflection?

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watmough
Well, I was trying to leave it open so people could write interesting things
about what they know.

I never would have thought this a couple of years ago, but I would now be very
happy to locked-in to a JVM platform, and my chosen libraries would be Swing
and a pure-Java Oracle JDBC.

I'm pretty sure I could make a good living using only that platform, plus
Scala, or Clojure, or maybe even Java iteself, though it's always seemed a bit
verbose if you write like the books tell you.

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breily
if you're working with python and images, the Python Imaging Library is a
must-have

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cstejerean
Are you asking specifically about C libraries or any library in general?

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watmough
Any libraries. It doesn't have to be C based.

For instance, I wouldn't be able to live without my Oracle JDBC libraries.

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cstejerean
If I had to take a programming language on a deserted language I would just
take Python, Emacs and IPython. I can't think of any single Python library
that I just can't live without. If I have to I will rewrite anything not part
of the standard.

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forsaken
BeautifulSoup is amazing. Django is as well (if that counts)

