> 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.

A huge portion of the Go standard library is extremely low quality as well. flag, container, image, json, log, much of math, path, regexp, sync and time are all notoriously low quality and will almost certainly get improved versions similar to encoding/json/v2. The container package alone has to be the worst package included with any major programming language in history. The standard library in general is also riddled with abstractions that don't hold across the various platforms that they claim to support. path and os are particularly awful in this regard.

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.