The standards for stability aren't inherently different in the standard library compared to an external one. If most of the external libraries don't provide good backwards compatibility, then that's just further demonstrating that they aren't a replacement for a standard library.
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The difference is that, when a better idea comes along, a new library can be created.
Just look at the Python community for a good example of this. A huge portion of the standard library sits gathering dust. The community has created replacements that work better.
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A better library can be created as part of the standard library too. Python's standard library is very poorly maintained and they moved away from wanting to have a strong standard library. It's no longer an example of a project that's attempting to provide that at this point.
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The Python library maintainers did exactly what you suggest, and they're still in the situation that they're in. The standard library is poorly maintained for exactly this reason.
A smaller core remains relevant, and is better maintained as a result.
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No, they didn't do anything close to what I suggest. The standard library was poorly thrown together and not thought out in the first place, and then they lost interest in improving it. They don't want a rich standard library anymore and aren't an example of trying to provide it.
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Sure they did. They stopped doing it for python3, but Python 2 had several redundant libraries. Like urllib2.
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They hardly did any of that and it's also not what I'm suggesting. I'm not sure why you're so interested in arguing against a strawman. Python is an example of what I'm suggesting is a good approach. It's a counterexample showing how to do things very poorly.
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Well, do you have any examples of it being done the way you want it done?
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Sure, Android's standard libraries along with the Kotlin language and standard libraries. It's an extremely broad and feature rich set of APIs. The platform has a versioned API level with yearly deprecations and removals. Evolves over time without legacy/abandoned apps breaking.
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You're talking about two different projects, one of which is VERY platform dependent. I can (and do) use Kotlin for much more than Android.
Do you have any examples of a programming language's standard library that offers what you want, without a platform SDK?
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Kotlin language and standard library take the same approach to gradually evolving without strict backwards compatibility. They avoid making sudden, drastic changes but rather slowly evolve it over time with easy to handle incremental backwards incompatible changes. Same approach.
Android's platform libraries and AndroidX Jetpack libraries (developer.android.com/jetpack/androi) certainly count as a form of standard library. The approach is dramatically different than the path taken by traditional platforms.
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When you're writing an Android app, the Kotlin / Java standard libraries, AndroidX and platform libraries cover nearly everything you need so you hardly need any third party libraries. Java's approach hardly ever actually removes anything in practice so it's not really the same.
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That's really easy to do when the standard library is as small as Kotlin's standard library. It's not quite as compact as Rust's, but it's pretty small.