Rust being a low-level library, adding something means inherently choosing a preferred approach to a problem rather than another, which may be disagreeble.
The consequence is that there would be still the sub-sub-dependencies problem, because the author of a crate may decide that the stdlib implementation is not appropriate for the use-case (Rust is low-level; low-level development is typically "pickier" than web development).
I personally think that it's good not to have higher level APIs in the stdlib. My only exception to this is the exclusion of fast hashing, because this choice had side-effects beyond simple need for an API.
Having two distinct "products" could help here. There could be a "bare rust" that is minimal and unopinionated, and used by those that need a small footprint, for example. A "battery included rust" could have common solutions to common problems that are hard to solve with "bare rust", at the expense of making choices that are best avoided for "bare rust".
My current outsider's perspective is that there's some kind of ever-shifting, never quite established consensus on which batteries to include, which tends to make it harder than necessary to switch project, interoperate between libraries etc.
> Having two distinct "products" could help here. There could be a "bare rust" that is minimal and unopinionated, and used by those that need a small footprint, for example
Rust being a low-level library, adding something means inherently choosing a preferred approach to a problem rather than another, which may be disagreeble.
The consequence is that there would be still the sub-sub-dependencies problem, because the author of a crate may decide that the stdlib implementation is not appropriate for the use-case (Rust is low-level; low-level development is typically "pickier" than web development).
I personally think that it's good not to have higher level APIs in the stdlib. My only exception to this is the exclusion of fast hashing, because this choice had side-effects beyond simple need for an API.