I sped up serde_json strings by 20%

I disagree with this, Python makes it trivial to add dependencies. [1] And yet Python developers tend to have the mentality of an older generation of software developers, pre-node/npm, and believe in keeping most things light. That starts with the language maintainers having a vision that says this should be possible, by including the batteries most people need for mid-size projects.

This has a compounding effect. People writing the dependencies that your dependencies will use might not even need dependencies outside of the Python standard library. In Rust, those dependencies have dependencies which have dependencies. You get a large tree even when everyone involved is being relatively sane. When one or two projects are not careful, and then everyone uses those projects ...

When I'm writing Rust, I eternally have the infuriating dilemma of picking which dependency to use for a relatively common operation. Having one blessed way to do something is an enormous productivity advantage, because it's never on you to vet the code. The disadvantages of a large stdlib are pretty overstated; even when an outside library outperforms the internal one (like Python's "requests"), the tendency will be for everyone to form a consensus about which outside library to use (like Python's "requests"), because that's how the ecosystem works.

Using technology designed 25 years ago has big advantages for Linux developers as well. Even when I need to add a dependency in Python, chances are I don't have to install one in my development environment because I can experiment with the shared dependencies already installed on my operating system. And I can look to the maintainers of the software I use - and my system maintainers - for implicit advice about which libraries are reliable and trustworthy, and use those. Rust, Go, etc., throw all of this out in the name of convenience for developers, but it's precisely as a developer that I find this mentality frustrating.

[1] People complain about the UX of e.g. pip in certain situations, but (regardless of whether it's a reasonable complaint) it's not the same issue as maintaining a stack of dependencies in the language itself being difficult.

I like your trade-off framing, but I do think that your argument fails to take account of something important here, which I'll try to illustrate with an example.

Let's say I want to run a simple modern web stack. In C#, I might pull in ASP.NET and EF Core. In Java, I might pull in Spring. In Rust, I might pull in axum, axum-server, rustls and sqlx. From those four deps alone, and before I have written a single line of code, I now have a three hundred and fifty-two line long `cargo tree`. There are three things to note on this.

First, and most obviously, this is far too many dependencies of dependencies, and this is before I add in a lot of other crates I'll need to work with this stack, or for my business logic. I can't seriously rely on - or even keep up with - a dep tree like this for a single and relatively simple project.

Second, a lot of these dependencies are made by anonymous users on github, are documented solely on Discord, change frequently, and do not appear to warrant a high degree of confidence. If Rust continues to gain traction, we will absolutely see security issues à la Pollyfill.JS or xz. For my livelihood, I'm necessarily going to place more trust in Microsoft's ASP.NET or VMWare's Spring than in @animewaifu420's three dozen half-abandoned packages and their 'dank' Discord.

Third, despite pulling in twenty-five times more dependencies than Alpine requires to run an OS, this is actually an extremely barebones web stack. No code-first database migrations, no authentication or authorisation, no internationalisation, no named routes, just to take some random basic features - all of this requires further crates (and, in turn, many dozens of further dependencies of dependencies.)

I'm using web as an illustrative example here, but this is an issue that permeates the ecosystem. I've faced similar issues for other use cases as well.

I like your trade-off framing, but I respectfully think it comes out strongly against Rust from an end user's perspective, at least at this point in Rust's history. I also think it elides over something important - the fact that Rust need not actually be like this. There's no reason Rust couldn't, in the future, have fully-featured crates, with dramatically curtailed dep trees and wide industry buy-in. But it's just not there at this stage. And so I return to my initial post - I quite like Rust, I've previously used it for years, but the ecosystem is years away from a sufficient level of maturity for me to feel inclined to return to it for any significant work at this stage.

Our dependency trees in `uv` and `ruff` at Astral are bigger than this. We rely on it and keep up with it. We do not spend most of our time dealing with the dependency tree. (Although I do think our compile times are longer than would be nice.)

> For my livelihood, I'm necessarily going to place more trust in Microsoft's ASP.NET or VMWare's Spring than in @animewaifu420's three dozen half-abandoned packages and their 'dank' Discord.

If this ends up being true, then that means there is financial incentive to provide something more holistic, right?

I don't know what "dank" Discords have to do with anything here.

From my perspective, I see a lot of derision and vague feelings in your commentary, but little hard data. Tons of production web applications are built in NodeJS on orders-of-magnitude larger dependency trees. Tons of peoples' livelihoods depend on it.

To be honest, I have a lot of the same feelings as you. I don't like large dependency trees either. But that tends to be more connected to tangible problems like compile times.

> There's no reason Rust couldn't, in the future, have fully-featured crates, with dramatically curtailed dep trees and wide industry buy-in.

There's no reason C couldn't have better dependency management either, right? But it doesn't. And the problem isn't just technical.

> but the ecosystem is years away from a sufficient level of maturity for me to feel inclined to return to it for any significant work at this stage.

I suspect the ecosystem is more mature than you think it is, particularly if your understanding of maturity boils down to just a single number of dependencies. But like, if you had written this comment originally, I probably wouldn't have replied. I don't think what you're saying is totally unreasonable, but I also don't see this changing either. Like, if Microsoft wanted to come in and build a nice web framework for Rust, I think it's very likely it would be built on top of the existing crate ecosystem. I don't think they would, for example, roll their own HTTP implementation unless there was some technical reason that `hyper` wouldn't work for them. I do not think they would do it just to get the dependency count down.

What you're seeing is a manifestation of a million tiny little decisions. Should I write my own URL parser? Or should I use a crate for it that I know is also used in production by a number of large companies? Why would you choose to roll your own? (Again, excepting technical reasons.) You wouldn't. You would use the one that already exists. And this decision procedure repeats over-and-over. Big companies aren't immune to it either.

In any case, I did say "trade off" and not "Rust's way is always better." So my reply makes room for viewpoints like yours, where as I think your original comment didn't make room for a more balanced take. That's why I responded.

IMO Rust has the best tradeoff between stdlib and ecosystem libraries I’ve ever seen in a (compiled) language, and that includes serde/serde_json.