[LawnGnome]

Completely agreed. My Rust origin story wasn't about memory safety, fearless concurrency, a modern type system, or anything else like that. Not that I didn't care about those things — I did — but none of them were what convinced me to start learning Rust.

What did convince me was being able to prototype things for the C project I was working on while having access to a standard library that included basic data structures, synchronisation primitives, and I/O handling in a way that used best practices from recent decades. Everything else was just a bonus that I got to learn and use as I went.

[nxobject]

Truth be told, I wouldn't mind crowdfunding an alternate stdlib for C for that reason. Everyone has a wishlist of patterns discovered after K&R bestowed upon us System V, that mesh perfectly well with C's philosophy and very minimal environments, and make modern programming much easier when you're dealing with lots of dependencies. (e.g. bounded strings/small strings, arena allocation, error chaining/coalescing, etc..).