Programming in Rust has become so much easier than when I first started. Not only the continuing polish of the core tools (e.g. error message clarity, rustfmt is bundled now) but also the increasing breadth and quality of the libraries available!
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The vast majority of libraries have a single maintainer. Even if you weight by downloads, roughly half of downloaded libraries have a single maintainer too.
My default assumption is that external libraries are better than what I (or an LLM) would write in a v1.
The extra effort to publish a project generally signifies that the author has spent a good amount of time on the problem. I end up prompting LLMs to prefer external code.
Coming from JS or Python, imports in Rust feel weird. They're entirely optional aliases for fully qualified symbols, which are always available.
I don't know of many other languages where you can just start using libraries. Java is the only one I can think of.
