The standard library is a set of declarations implicitly available to all Orc programs. In this section we give an informal description of the standard library, including the type of each declaration and a short explanation of its use.

Orc programs are expected to rely on the host language and environment for all but the most essential sites. For example, in the Java implementation of Orc, the entire Java standard library is available to Orc programs via class declarations. Therefore the Orc standard library aims only to provide convenience for the most common Orc idioms, not the complete set of features needed for general-purpose programming.