I'm not saying that there's a problem with doing things one way or another. Rather, I'm asking whether there's a problem with doing things differently that then led to this design decision to be made with Rust. I want to better understand how this language came to be.

I can see that. I'm coming in from the other extreme that is Python, where even the meta-programming is done in plain Python.

C++ was my first programming language. I remember the nightmare of dealing with dependencies and avoiding boost because it felt wrong to need a third part library for basic features. The toolchain for Rust is very nice (not just compared to C++, but all other languages I've worked with) and has so far been a huge joy to work with. The language itself too. I'm just curious about why the language likes to expose more of its features through meta-programming rather than directly in the language itself. Things like println! and format! being macros instead of functions, or needing a bunch of #[derive(Debug,Default,Eq,PartialEq)] everywhere for things that other language provide through regular code.

I'm not talking about what features are in the standard libraries vs third party libraries. I mean meta-programming as in the stuff that generates Rust code. Take console printing for example, we use a macro println! in Rust. Other languages provide an actual function (e.g. printf in C, System.out.println in Java, print in Python, etc). The code for my first project is also full of things like #[derive(Debug,Default,Eq,PartialEq)] to get features that I normally achieve through regular code in other languages. These things are still in the Rust standard library as I understand it.

Thanks, that's a good start.

The bigger question for me is whether there's more to it than privacy and blurring out faces.