I'm sure this library does the thing it claims to do very nicely. However, as a programmer I am saddened that so many things that should have been in the standard library by now need to come from external repositories and have a weird and unintuitive names.
Rather than having 3-5 ways to do a say a GUI from the stdlib you have 0 and instead you can pick a dependency that suits your way.
That then boils down to even data structures, there's a bunch of trade-offs to be made where one is better than the other and if Rust had to maintain 30 different types of maps for each use case that seems like a waste of their time. Push that work off to the people that need those maps.
I'm torn. I don't write Rust much at all, but I have been playing around with it a little here and there for the last couple years. When I first tried it out, I was shocked that almost nothing I was looking for could be found in the stdlib. I thought I was looking in the wrong place. Coming mostly from the Go world, it was jarring to me when it turned out that out no, it really just barely has a stdlib.
Now after on some pondering though, there is a strength in that the Rust team doesn't have to focus on maintaining such a large stdlib, as you said. I find myself using external libraries for many things in Go already, so why not just extend that to slightly more fundamental things with lots of variance too.
I think the largest downside with this approach, however, is that it's hard for me to know what the de facto, collectively-agreed-upon standard is for a given task.
I agree with this take a lot. I think having lots of custom implementations is inevitable for systems languages - the only reason why Rust is different is because Cargo/crates.io makes things available for everyone, where in C/C++ land you will often just DIY everything to avoid managing a bunch of dependencies by hand or with cmake/similar.
I try to tell all new programmers that ask me for advice that keeping abreast of the words of tools that are available for use is a big part of the work and shouldn't be left out. If I quit my daily / weekly trawl of what's out there, I'd surely start to atrophy.
The teams who compile the standard libraries are still made up of people, and sometimes better libraries get written outside of those teams. It's just a natural consequence of the intense collaboration we have in this industry. In fact, I am GLAD things happen this way, because it shows how flexible and open minded folks are when it comes to such libraries.
