I completely agree that a strong standard library is essential, and we've been working very hard over the last months to set explicit conventions, revamp APIs,

I completely agree that a strong standard library is essential, and we've been working very hard over the last months to set explicit conventions, revamp APIs, and generally get Rust's standard library into a 1.0 state. You shouldn't read much into the "experimental" tags right now; they're part of an API stability tracking system that is heavily in flux at the moment. In particular, for most of the modules you mentioned, only the module name itself has not been marked "stable", while the contents have been. For example, if you look at the Vec type itself: http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/vec/struct.Vec.html# http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/vec/struct.Vec.ht... you'll see that most methods are unstable or stable, rather than experimental. (The "experimental" status is currently the default, to help us keep track of API "stabilization" progress.) This stability tracking is part of our general story about API compatibility; you can read more at http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html These markers won't take on their full meaning until we ship 1.0. For 1.0, all of the APIs you mentioned will be "stable", and indeed most of their internals already are. Over the next few weeks, we'll be updating stability markers to reflect the API scrutiny and design work that we've been doing. More generally, for all but a couple of the modules listed at http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/index.html?search=#modules http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/index.html?search... we have already performed a detailed scrutiny of the API, and have either landed changes needed for 1.0 or will do so very soon. Most truly experimental APIs have already been deprecated or removed. For IO in particular, you can read a very recent RFC that proposes the final set of API changes for 1.0: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/517 https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/517 Hope that helps!