Interestingly the situation is somewhat similar to Javascript: a very lean standard library, paired with a great package manager that makes sharing code simple.

Interestingly the situation is somewhat similar to Javascript: a very lean standard library, paired with a great package manager that makes sharing code simple. I agree that the dependency problem is getting continuously worse though. An important factor is people splitting up crates into multiple sub-crates, proc macro crates (which have to live in a separate crate), and generally having a much too cavalier attitude about adding dependencies. The last year has been particularly bad, but on the flip side there is also increased awareness and motivation to counter this. Rust will never have a stdlib like Go, with http server/client, compression and crypto algorithms, ... But I do think that it needs to be conservatively extended with some core primitives that are missing. A problem is the still heavily evolving language. A few upcoming features could change idiomatic API design, so putting anything in std now could be a big mistake in the long term.