[okanat]

Having some of those libraries listed and then not being able to change API or the implementation is what killed modern C++ adoption (along with the language being a patchwork on top of C).

As some of the previous commenters said, when you focus your language to make it easy to write a specific type of program, then you make tradeoffs that can trap you in those constraints like having a runtime, a garbage collector and a set of APIs that are ingrained in the stdlib.

Rust isn't like that. As a system programmer I want none of them. Rust is a systems programming language. I wouldn't use Rust if it had a bloated stdlib. I am very happy about its stdlib. Being able to swap out the regex, datetime, arg parsing and encoding are a feature. I can choose memory-heavy or cpu-heavy implementations. I can optimize for code size or performance or sometimes neither/both.

If the trade-offs were made to appease the easy (web/app) development, it wouldn't be a systems programming language for me where I can use the same async concepts on a Linux system and an embedded MCU. Rust's design enables that, no other language's design (even C++) does.

If a web developer wants to use a systems programming language, that's their trade-off for a harder to program language. The similar type safety to Rust's is provided with Kotlin or Swift.

Dependency bloat is indeed a problem. Easy inclusion of dependencies is also a contributing factor. This problem can be solved by making dependencies and features granular. If the libraries don't provide the granularity you want, you need to change libraries/audit source/contribute. No free meals.

[mplanchard]

Yeah I’ve encountered the benefit of this approach recently when writing WASM binaries for the web, where binary size becomes something we want to optimize for.

The de facto standard regex library (which is excellent!) brings in nearly 2 MB of additional content for correct unicode operations and other purposes. The same author also makes regex-lite, though, which did everything we need, with the same interface, in a much smaller package. It made it trivial to toss the functionality we needed behind a trait and choose a regex library appropriately in different portions of our stack.

[whstl]

> Being able to swap out the regex, datetime, arg parsing and encoding are a feature

A feature present on every language that has those in the stdlib.

[mplanchard]

Not necessarily, when other components of the stdlib depend on them

[whstl]

Also not necessarily with third-party libraries.

[okanat]

Indeed. However, you need to recognize that having those features in stdlib creates a huge bias against swapping them out. How many people in Java actually uses alternative DB APIs than JDBC? How many alternative encoding libraries are out there for JSON in Go? How about async runtimes, can you replace that in Go easily?

[mplanchard]

True! Although it’s easier to swap out a third party lib that’s using a bloated dependency than it is to avoid something in std.