Hacker News Reader

I love rust, but the standard libraries are nowhere near the same abstraction level of nodejs.

All services I've deployed built on rust pulls in a kitchen sink of deps.

Granted. I get a static binary as my end result, so maybe it's fine.

Rust is designed that way, to be fair. They expressly did not want to be batteries included like python is. The reasons are what they are and not particularly relevant to the conversation, but pulling in well designed third party crates is the point.

Speaking from a python user's perspective, the batteries included philosophy works great when you have a neutral implementation. Python does a good enough job, and provides extensibility in a way that I don't need to download a package to do basic things. On the other I have to spend hours trying to find a package in JS that just gets shit done. The third party package way is only required for ui parts because you don't want everything to look generic. But having a good standard library to do non user facing stuff is essential. That's why every node project ends up with a thousand dependencies. Because the language is not batteries included. There in JS there is no "one correct and obvious way to do everything" which makes doing basic programming painful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com