The language team has been focusing on providing the primitives needed for an efficient HTTP client and server, that is, async/await. That only got stabilized a few weeks ago. If we had put HTTP in the standard library before then, it would have only been synchronous. That would have been a huge drawback.
Oh absolutely, you actually mentioned that to me a few years back when I was first looking at Rust, and that’s a totally reasonable place to have been in. It’s just unfortunate that so many people decided to depend on an external library/framework and then got upset like this. For me it meant Rust wasn’t a language I should use for web servers at that moment, which hopefully won’t be the case for too much longer. I will say that as a user it’d be great to see an officially maintained lib like ‘net/http’, even if it isn’t a part of the std lib itself.
