Completeness and compactness properties in metric spaces, topological groups and function spaces

Abstract: We prove that many completeness properties coincide in metric spaces, precompact groups and dense subgroups of products of separable metric groups. We apply these results to function spaces C_p(X,G) of G-valued continuous functions on a space X with the topology of pointwise convergence, for a separable metric group G. Not only the results but also the proofs themselves are novel even in the classical case when G is the real line. A space X is weakly pseudocompact if it is G_delta-dense in at least one of its compactifications. A topological group G is precompact if it is topologically isomorphic to a subgroup of a compact group. We prove that every weakly pseudocompact precompact topological group is pseudocompact, thereby answering positively a question of Tkachenko.