The spartan C standard library was what my comment regarding 'small languages' was referencing. I don't have much experience with many of C's contemporaries, but for an opposing view take for instance the standard library of Ada ( I use the term 'standard' here to connote the library that is mandated as per the standard of these languages ). It is definitely orders of magnitude larger than that of C, and takes a fundamentally different perspective. Ada's standard library, while dated by modern standards, looks more like it was designed to address the specific needs of its domain. Mind you, it could be argued that C's stdlib was also, if you restrict its domain to 'OS development'. My point is that for a language like Rust, that does not have a tiny stdlib like C, its standard library should address the common use cases required by its developers. Node.js is another bad offender here. If you look at the most popular npm modules, you'll see things like 'body-parser' and 'async', which clearly show gaps in the functionality that Node's stdlib is catering for.