too many dependencies

[JeffBezanson]

As we all know, many packages depend on Compat. Unfortunately, Compat depends on every standard library package, which is a problem for static compilation via e.g. filter_stdlibs in PackageCompiler --- you can't use a simple compatibility shim function without bringing in the REPL, Pkg, etc. Is there any possible path to removing these dependencies? I see we have binding deprecations for them here, but I don't remember what they do exactly.

[martinholters]

From memory, some code archaeology might (or might not) confirm: When things started to be moved into stdlibs and you had to do using StdLib, Compat provided Compat.StdLib which was just StdLib on the then-current Julia version and some self-constructed module on older Julia versions that tried to mimic the then-current version of StdLib. We can probably remove the deprecations and the dependencies along with them and call the result v4.0.