If you are shipping a binary library, like the standard library, you don't know which parts of your library users are going to use when they link it, so you need to ship binaries with all of it to all Rust users.

The only one that can strip is the end user compiling a final binary, and the compiler often cannot do this for you because that requires whole program optimization and full LTO, which is super super slow.

Also, just because the final binary doesn't use a symbol, doesn't imply that the symbol isn't used. You can ship a library with a main function that can be run as an executable, or linked as a library. The linker doesn't know.

You would really need to go out of your way to strip your binary for your particular application. This is possible, and not that hard.

But the point remains: why should 99% of Rust users have to go through the trouble just so that those who need this don't have to write `cargo add unicode-segmentation` ?

Rust philosophy is "don't pay for what you don't use", so if your organization doesn't support third-party dependencies, they need a language with "batteries included", and not a language like Rust that comes without batteries by design.

Proposing to make Rust come with batteries included is proposing to change one of Rust's core values. Go ahead and write an RFC for that. I'll get my popcorn.