In my opinion, Java’s standard library is good, but not as good as the one in Python and then Golang. I also prefer the one in C#.
Libraries refuse to shift away from this culture thing, and decided to just blacklist the known exploit path while keeping the vulnerability intact. It's not that they do this for backward-compatibility, it's new libraries still being designed this way.
The log4j 2 bug is slightly different, but IMO as a design issue it has root in the same culture thing described above.
Log4j 2 refused to shift away from it since they are paid to add that kind of bloat, yes this wasn't an accident caused by a bad culture, this was a feature someone requested. As far as I understood they are completely separate from the original log4j and it is just another, mostly compatible logging implementation.
> Java is unique as the culture encourages doing magic convention over configuration by reflection AND it-just-works serialization
As opposed to what? Python? The language that culturally refuses to fix the GIL and as workaround provides multiprocessing, which requires that everything is serialized?
Also I may not have seen many Python code bases, but from what I have seen ClassLoader/Import abuse is alive in both languages.
Python at least does not pretend their it-just-works serialization is secure. The documentation [1] actively discourages deserializing untrusted data and suggests to use pure data format (e.g. JSON) as possible.
In contrast, the documentation on ObjectInputStream before Java 11 does not warn about this at all. Even then [2], it suggests to implement blacklist/whitelist filters, and it is pretty hard to get right. The same filtering can also be done for pickle, but the usual consensus in Python developers seems to be "don't do this even if it's possible".
> but from what I have seen ClassLoader/Import abuse is alive in both languages.
Yeah, should have said that my rant is mainly against endless deserialization/OGNL injection/whatever-popular-expression-language injection bugs in frameworks, not abusing ClassLoader. These features, just like log4j2's code-execution-disguised-as-string-interpolation feature [3], shouldn't exist.
[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html
[2] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base...
[3] I'd argue that's the real bug, instead of the obvious JNDI class loader blah blah stuff. Luckily log4j didn't refuse to fix it and completely removed "message lookup".
There is a size limit for standard libraries?
I think Java introduced modules and its dependency model so you could package only what your software needed.
There is a size limit to what language curators are able to maintain, yes.
The idea of the standard library is that it will select components that are general enough to cover a wide range of use cases; therefore the language builders ned time to review every new proposal, and their time is limited.
You may dump everything under the sun in the standard library, but then it won't be better than what you get from a library marketplace.
It still contains only a tiny fraction of the functionality needed by any large project. The world is just too complex for a standard library to ever realistically cover a meaningful portion of the problem space.
We all need tensor algebra, video decoding, cutting-edge network protocols, compression, cryptography, dozens of data exchange formats, syscall bindings for three or more platforms, fuzzing, containers, and I don't know what else. This isn't going to all fit into a standard library. "Dependency hell" is here to stay.