alt Hacker News> arrayref is a small crate of four macros.
Why do so many languages fall into this horrible practice?
Replies
Only the ones that make it easy. Language package managers are a mistake.
Just like c++ thought threads wasn't a std library concern and then later changed they minds, rust will also change tac I predict
There are two reasons you might want to use a crate, The first being that you want to use a good solid implementation that you know someone has spent more time doing and works better than almost any solution you could integrate. The second is you don't want to spend time implementing that.
Writing macros in rust is a pretty horrible experience but it's not difficult
They aren't trivial, at least: https://docs.rs/arrayref/0.3.9/src/arrayref/lib.rs.html#202-...
The languages that have a poor standard library support have this issue and other languages encourage you to import tons of libraries to fix the problem.
This is why Javascript and Typescript suffer from this the most and has little to nothing to do with "popularity" and likely 9/10 of these npm packages import an external library.
Golang on the other-hand is just as popular and has a stronger standard library which people build against and it is encouraged to use its standard library rather than rolling your own or importing another package to solve the problem.
There was a recent talk which explored this question (Dependency Cultures, by Richard Feldman):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82ly38YEEQ
Summary: it's cultural. Rust likely inherited the practice from Nodejs, who inherited it from Ruby. I think in Rust online spaces in particular there is also this undercurrent of "you're not smart enough to use certain parts of the language, so download libraries that handle that stuff for you."