Rust has a nice standard library, but much nice functionality comes from external crates. If you haven't yet, you should check out the Cargo tutorial[1], which

Rust has a nice standard library, but much nice functionality comes from external crates. If you haven't yet, you should check out the Cargo tutorial[1], which is an intro to the package management and build system. I have used a JSON library, which worked well out of the box. I'm sure there are others up there for your other bullets. I will say that all strings in Rust are Unicode, so the support is there. Edit to your question about large projects: I think Rust's type system will prove to be a long-term benefit for large projects. The type system / borrow checker combination is the secret sauce of Rust. [1] http://doc.crates.io/index.html http://doc.crates.io/index.html