Erm ....
Its limited compared to Go as well.
And that's a BIG deal because Go gives you single binaries with a stdlib that allows you to hit the ground running in a serious manner.
For example, making API calls which is the sort of thing many here do for their bread and butter. Everything you need to do can be don in Go stdlib without opening yourself up to supply chain vulnerabilities or having to choose which crate or having to keep track of crates versioning. The same could be said of crypto or hundreds of other things present in the Go stdlib.
Also, even network services benefit from things like OpenAPI for type safety, and you don't get that from the Go stdlib.
Sure, but the point is for the majority of people writing stuff in Go, they can get 99% of the way there with the Go stdlib.
Then, if they need to import one or two things to help them, such as the AWS Go SDK or whatever, that's perfectly fine.
It still means you end up with a go.mod file that has literally only two or three third-party imports in it.
Meanwhile if you wanted to write the equivalent tool in Rust, if you don't care you'll quickly end up with a Cargo.toml measured in hundreds of lines.
And if you are willing to put in the hours to hand-cherry-pick and make your Rust imports "reasonably necessary", then you'll still have a whole bunch more third-party imports than the Go equivalent.
Also if you go look at any real Go projects they usually use tons of dependencies and they're usually pinned to random git hashes which is its own massive problem.
So your argument boils down to having to add `reqwest = "0.13.3"` to your `Cargo.toml`.
It depends on perspective. Go is tailored for writing backends, so it's great that it provides things like net/http (we could also interpret cause and effect inversely here; Go provides net/http so it gets used for writing backends). Rust's standard library is actually pretty damn huge, but it doesn't index heavily into specific applications, and instead tries to provide comprehensive support for low-level operations that enable you to build a custom-tailored solution to whatever you need on top of it. Rust's stdlib is "small" if all you want to do is build a webserver and don't want to go shopping around for libraries, but anyone who's intimately familiar with Rust's stdlib can tell you for a fact that it's absolutely not small in absolute terms. Rust literally stabilizes hundreds of new stdlib functions per year.
So in other words Rust forces you to either (a) re-invent the wheel (yet again !) or (b) import yet-another-crate into your project.
Of course if you choose (b), then its having first wasted your time deciding which of hundreds of yet-another-crate-doing-the-same-thing you want to import.
Its a waste of time and effort for the majority of projects where you are not working with embedded systems or trying to squeeze every micro-second of performance out of your system.
Sadly the majority of Rust projects show exactly zero import discipline, both from a pure import perspective and a security perspective. Which is why many Rust projects end up importing a gazillion crates.
Import discipline in Rust is hard work. Sure you can reach "reasonably necessary" level of imports the majority of Rust projects simply don't bother because its such a pain in the backside.
Don't get me wrong, Rust has its place in this world. But for many people on many projects they would be better off using Go and only using Rust where there is actually a serious use-case for it in their environment.
This is inherent to the domain of systems programming. One-size-fits-all solutions only suffice until you need extreme performance. So, for example, Rust provides a basic hashmap in the stdlib, and as a generalist hashmap it's quite close to state-of-the-art. But as a generalist hashmap it's also beaten in specific applications by specialist datastructures, and Rust needs to provide support for building those specialist datastructures in a way that makes them feel just as first-class as what the stdlib provides.
Go gets away with what it does because it's for domains where it's acceptable to trade uniformity for performance. This is not a bad thing! Go is quite performant. But Rust ultimately isn't competing with Go, it's competing with C.
And note that I say all this as someone who is, in fact, a stdlib maximalist. But I also say all this as someone who is conscientious and informed of the realities of what it takes to design and maintain a secure, high-performance stdlib.
Lest people imagine Rust has so few collections because nobody offered any others, Aria has a rant in her Linked Lists "tutorial" where she explains that pre Rust 1.0 she was cleaning out all the miscellaneous collection types few people need - and she tried but failed to remove the linked list type. There's some very niche types in her list, things I've heard of but never used in decades of professional software engineering.
Strong words. Care to back them up?
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
If the original repo were to disappear, it would be important to know who wrote the code and what the license actually is.
And yet, I've been in situations where the only thing I had was urllib2, and I was very grateful it existed. It's awesome that the Python stdlib has everything it does, even if most of the time a pypi package is going to be superior.