@Fiona I was just at a talk about this, apparently it’s a deliberate design decision to keep the standard library relatively small. Don’t know about grapheme clusters, but for random numbers, the rand crate is good and widely used.

@benjamingeer I am kinda aware, I just think it’s a horrible mindset for a programming language, because it means that the language fails to provide any guidance or common vocabulary. If you search for “random” on crates.io it won’t even show up (or at least not on the first page), and there are over 8000 total results.

And even if you search for it by name, the package is by its own declaration in early development and not ready for production use (Version 0.10.0, see the definition of semver, which I keep having to remind everyone is what the official rust documentation points to!).

Furthermore there is one person listed as owner, meaning the bus-factor here might be 1 (one), which is the opposite of a reliable supply chain. I also don’t know anything about him and whether he is trustworthy.

On the dependency side of things, it has one dependency to rand-core, which is by the same maintainer (fair), and four optional dependencies to other packages; so if I want to have the full feature set, it’s not even enough for me to add this depency, but further ones, increasing the vulnerability of my supply chain even more.

And nothing here is unusual or special about the rand-package, most of these points hold for most things. And that’s why it is so important to have a rich standard library, or at the very least major established projects providing rich libraries. And rust is simply lacking there…