A new paper argues WG21 should adopt Zig's philosophy of maintaining a deliberately small standard library. Zig, created by Andrew Kelley, focuses on low-level utilities like memory allocators and data structures while excluding domain-specific functionality. The language actively removes components that don't justify their maintenance burden.

Zig's approach is enabled by a first-class package manager that makes third-party dependencies trivially accessible. When something leaves the standard library, users simply add a dependency and continue working. This contrasts sharply with C++'s permanent additions - every component creates perpetual obligations for compiler vendors, educators, and future proposals. The economic asymmetry is stark: proposers pay once while everyone else pays forever.

The paper identifies this as a classic externality problem where proposers capture benefits while socializing long-term costs. Historical examples like std::regex and std::any demonstrate how seemingly reasonable additions become maintenance burdens. The committee lacks mechanisms to audit whether standardized features deliver promised value, leading to unbounded complexity growth.