alt Hacker NewsIn general, I get your argument, but cryptography is the perfect example for something so well-specified, well-understood, and extremely widely used, that these arguments do not really apply. You are not going to have to make backwards-incompatible changes to SHA256 or Poly1305, etc. It has minimal API surface too, and is not going to be a large maintenance burden. But nearly everybody is going to need crypto at some point. It is great to have blessed and well-audited standard implementations that people can rely on, without even having to make a choice. This it is not something where you want “the community to make backwards incompatible changes at a higher pace.”.
Crypto is something any modern language should include in the stdlib, imo.
Proviso: you do cryptography in the stdlib if you have the means to do it well. Go did; Filippo Valsorda has built a whole company practice on keeping that library excellent.
Certainly, that's a better outcome than just providing bindings to OpenSSL, which is what most other languages do.