Fair question. Noting that I am a Python person who has only tooled around with Rust a bit, a few packages I think warrant inclusion because the base options are too anemic:
- Command line parsing (more feature rich the manually iterating over args)
- (De)Compression: tar, zip, gzip, bzip2
- CSV parser
- Date time
- Hashing: md5, sha1, sha256
- HTTP requests
- Logging
- Random generation: ints, floats, sampling, uuids
- Regex
- SQLite bindings
- (De)serialization: json, ini, toml, yaml
- System niceties: where is user home?, # of cpus?
Appreciating some of these are quite complex, and probably best left to a crate that has more leeway in experimentation/breaking APIs.
Maybe some of these can be chalked up to language philosophy or APIs as you said, but many of these would be welcome additions in my eyes.
I think regex, time, and crates like num_cpus would especially be nice to have. There's plenty of those types of crates where it feels like you can't compile a single project without seeing it float by as you build the dependencies.
Edit: tried to make the formatting less bad