In terms of my personal projects I am thinking for some time about using Rust in a way I usually use C - minimal dependencies, at most two level dependencies (my dependencies and their dependencies, no their dependencies dependencies). I could afford it, because of what I usually want to work on. Maybe at times even going further as sometimes I do with my C projects and forgo some parts or entirety of the standard library. It would not be a common Rust, but it would be safer than the usual C and would have some ergonomic wins.
If that's what you want, you're already treading a very non-standard path. At that point, you might want to think about changing languages.
Zig might be a better fit. The community tends to like minimal dependencies and bootstrapping. The downside is that it is a relatively new language with all the grief that brings. But, if you're going Rust with minimal dependencies, you're already in "Here Be Dragons" territory.
And, this might especially apply to you as you mentioned C. I see Zig as a better C while Rust is a much better C++.
> If that's what you want, you're already treading a very non-standard path.
Rust makes it quite easy to forgo a large portion of the standard library. rustc and cargo are separate tools, if you don't want cargo's features, you can use rustc as normal.
These paths may not be popular but that doesn't mean they aren't well supported, and depending on your niche, may not even be that unpopular. embedded on things that are small enough you're not running embedded Linux, for example, rarely use the standard library.
