I see it kind of like Go's lack of generics, in a strange way. With Go, no one was explicitly "anti-generics", it's just the core team couldn't find a design they liked, and as time went on it became sort of a meme. "Go is opposed to generics." "No, here's that blog post by Russ Cox about finding a way to implement them." Etc, etc.
Similarly, the rust core team was afraid to settle on designs for certain libraries, pointing out things like python's various standard library HTTP modules, and at least "for now" shunting a lot of functionality out into the ecosystem. When you have limited manpower, this makes sense, but I think a lot of people have since rationalized that decision as philosophically the right thing to do, not just a way of prioritizing development work.
In other words, I feel like it's a case of a smart tactical decision growing into an identity.
Disclosure: only dabbled in Rust a bit, currently maintain two crates of some traction.
I’d love to use Rust in the OS I work on, but integrating our build system with Cargo and dealing with external crates is a huge obstacle.
That's a challenging one. I'd like to have native support for C integration as well, but we'll have to balance that with the stability of the corresponding clang interfaces, and the requirement to ship extra libraries that the Rust toolchain doesn't currently ship.
Working on it, though.
> The rand and regex crates are two other examples.
rand I'd agree with, though it would need paring down to not have as many dependencies. For regex, there are multiple tradeoffs to be made; for instance, the most popular regex crate is fast and does most of what people want but doesn't have backreferences or lookahead/lookbehind assertions.
Ah, that's something I did not consider...
I would actually prefer if the Rust std would not include functionality that's not essential, for example sockets don't seem essential and the standard library does not implement them in a particularly complete and well thought out manner either IMHO.
Being in std implies some kind of quality standard, but it also implies no backwards incompatible changes. A set of libraries blessed by a trusted group could give you the quality standard without constraining backwards compatibility.
It is as simple as that. When serious, important projects depend on a standard library is because they want those guarantees. Having some members of Rust work on some crates does not give anyone those guarantees.
Which is why all those crates must be in std, or declare that the standard library is a set of crates (including core, std and others).
That’s what java spent years on getting (https://www.oracle.com/corporate/features/understanding-java...), and I think that’s the way to go for any language. It prevents the standard library from bloating, yet provides quality libraries that can be trusted. It also allows some implementations to be standard without providing all the bells and whistles. That can be useful on small platforms, and allows for ‘heavier’ optional libraries (for example a SVG renderer, PDF parser, etc)
Can't cargo refer to arbitrary git repos or even just plain directories? I don't see how it's any different from C or C++ in that case.
At work, we have a number of Phoenix web apps with JS frontends. Looking at one randomly, there's... checking... 48 elixir dependencies and... checking... 911!! JS ones. I have to spend literally hours every week keeping those stupid JS dependencies up to date across our apps. The churn is enormous.
I think the fear is that as long as rust keeps its standard library small, a culture may develop to have more and more in the crate ecosystem, which proves to be a huge maintenance burden, as those are freer to update in breaking ways, and cross-depend on each other.