I think that there is a general desire to work with the system, and since that is how other systems languages have generally done it, doing it the same way feels good. You don't necessarily want to innovate on everything all at once.

It is true that for various reasons, Rust can't take as much advantage as say, C can.

> I'm guessing this is related to what you mean by potentially being able to do something differently if there were more time before 1.0?

I mean more traditional language design things, but sure, this too.

Interesting. My perception for why other systems languages generally compile things to libraries is that they tend to use dynamic linking from a single instance of libraries on a system. I would have expected that when static linking is the default, the argument for having standalone intermediate libraries is much weaker, since the deviation from the other systems languages has already been decided. Maybe I'm missing something about how choosing static linking by default but still supporting dynamic linking requires still having a library as the output always.