[saghm]

In addition to the points burntsushi gave in the sibling comment, I'd also add that keeping the standard library small and putting other well-scoped stuff like tegex, rand, etc. in dependencies also can reduce the burden of releases a lot. If some a bug gets found in a library that's not std, a new release can get pushed out pretty quickly. If a bug gets found in std, an entire new toolchain version needs to be published. That's not to say that this wouldn't be done for critical bugs, but when Rust already has releases on a six-week cadence, it's not crazy to try to reduce the need for additional releases on top of that.

This probably isn't as important as the stability concerns, but I think it still helps tilt the argument in favor of a small std at least a little.