I am not a Rust expert but the thing with the standard libraries is that it only has peer dependencies with itself and they are all synced to the same version.

Meaning if you only use the std lib you:

1) Will never include two different versions of the same peer dependency because of incompatible version requirements.

2) Will usually not have two dependencies relying on two different peer-dependencies that do the same thing. This can still happen for deprecated std lib features, but tends to be a much lesser issue.

These two issues are usually the ones that cause dependency size explosion in projects.

I don't have a problem with dependencies in principle. There's a good reason for standard libraries to contain a decent amount of code. It is a vector for supply chain attacks, but I also have a lot of trust in the Rust maintainers. The Rust standard library is exceptionally well-written from what I've seen, so I'm not too worried about it.

FWIW I checked out the nightly toolchain, and it looks like the stdlib is less than 400k SLoC. So literally 10x smaller.