Top 100 Rust Crates by Impact | Generated by AI

Home 2025.08

It’s challenging to provide an exact “top 100” list by real-time download count, as such specific metrics aren’t publicly and dynamically ranked by Crates.io in that granular way. However, based on general popularity, extensive use in projects, and impact on the Rust ecosystem, here’s a list of highly influential and widely used Rust libraries (crates), with a brief description for each. This list considers factors like direct download numbers (where available from Lib.rs/Crates.io, though these fluctuate), transitive dependencies (how many other crates depend on them), and community recognition.

Note: The download counts provided by Lib.rs (which gathers data from Crates.io) are constantly changing. The numbers below are approximate as of early July 2025 and are meant to give a sense of scale.

Top Rust Libraries by Impact and Popularity (Approx. 100)

  1. serde: A generic serialization/deserialization framework. (Downloads: 24.9M)
  2. serde_json: A JSON serialization file format built on serde. (Downloads: 21.7M)
  3. thiserror: Derive macro for easily implementing the std::error::Error trait. (Downloads: 27.7M)
  4. rand: Random number generators and other randomness functionality. (Downloads: 30.7M)
  5. clap: A Command Line Argument Parser that is efficient and full-featured. (Downloads: 20.9M)
  6. syn: A parser for Rust source code, widely used in procedural macros. (Downloads: 42.7M)
  7. tokio: An event-driven, non-blocking I/O platform for asynchronous applications. (Downloads: 16.3M)
  8. log: A lightweight logging facade for Rust. (Downloads: 23.1M)
  9. anyhow: Flexible concrete Error type built on std::error::Error, simplifying error handling. (Downloads: 17.1M)
  10. quote: A quasi-quoting macro for generating Rust code. (Downloads: 29.1M)
  11. regex: A library for regular expressions that guarantees linear time matching. (Downloads: 20.1M)
  12. proc-macro2: A substitute implementation of the compiler’s proc_macro API. (Downloads: 29.3M)
  13. base64: Encodes and decodes base64 as bytes or UTF-8. (Downloads: 29.6M)
  14. itertools: Extra iterator adaptors, methods, and functions. (Downloads: 32.3M)
  15. chrono: A comprehensive date and time library for Rust. (Downloads: 14.5M)
  16. reqwest: A higher-level HTTP client library. (Downloads: 12.5M)
  17. libc: Raw FFI bindings to platform libraries like libc. (Downloads: 28.2M)
  18. once_cell: Single assignment cells and lazy values. (Downloads: 23.8M)
  19. tracing: Application-level tracing for Rust. (Downloads: 14.7M)
  20. futures: Provides streams, zero-allocation futures, and iterator-like interfaces. (Downloads: 13.2M)
  21. lazy_static: A macro for declaring lazily evaluated statics. (Downloads: 19.2M)
  22. tempfile: For managing temporary files and directories. (Downloads: 14.3M)
  23. bitflags: A macro to generate structures that behave like bitflags. (Downloads: 33.9M)
  24. url: A URL parsing and manipulation library based on the WHATWG URL Standard. (Downloads: 14.2M)
  25. toml: A native Rust encoder and decoder for TOML-formatted files. (Downloads: 15.0M)
  26. bytes: Types and traits for working with bytes, optimized for I/O. (Downloads: 17.0M)
  27. uuid: Generates and parses UUIDs. (Downloads: 14.4M)
  28. indexmap: A hash table with consistent order and fast iteration. (Downloads: 29.0M)
  29. env_logger: A logging implementation for log configured via environment variables. (Downloads: 12.1M)
  30. async-trait: Enables type erasure for async trait methods. (Downloads: 11.9M)
  31. num-traits: Numeric traits for generic mathematics. (Downloads: 19.0M)
  32. sha2: Pure Rust implementation of SHA-2 hash functions. (Downloads: 14.1M)
  33. rustls: A modern, safe, and fast TLS library written in Rust.
  34. hyper: A fast and correct HTTP implementation for Rust.
  35. actix-web: A powerful, pragmatic, and extremely fast web framework.
  36. diesel: A safe, extensible ORM and query builder for Rust.
  37. rayon: A data-parallelism library for easily parallelizing computations.
  38. sqlx: An asynchronous, pure Rust SQL toolkit.
  39. axum: A web application framework that focuses on ergonomics and modularity.
  40. tonic: A gRPC over HTTP/2 implementation built on Hyper and Tower.
  41. tracing-subscriber: Utilities for implementing and composing tracing subscribers.
  42. crossbeam: Tools for concurrent programming in Rust.
  43. parking_lot: Highly concurrent and fair implementations of common synchronization primitives.
  44. dashmap: A community-driven concurrent hash map.
  45. flate2: Wrappers for the miniz_oxide and zlib compression libraries.
  46. ring: Cryptographic functions written in Rust and assembly.
  47. cc: A build-time dependency for compiling C/C++ code.
  48. bindgen: Automatically generates Rust FFI bindings to C (and C++) libraries.
  49. wasm-bindgen: Facilitates high-level interactions between Wasm modules and JavaScript.
  50. web-sys: Raw Rust bindings to Web APIs.
  51. console_error_panic_hook: A hook for panics that logs errors to the browser console.
  52. console_log: A logging backend for the log crate that prints to the browser console.
  53. nalgebra: Linear algebra library for Rust.
  54. image: Image processing library.
  55. egui: An easy-to-use immediate mode GUI library.
  56. winit: A cross-platform window creation library.
  57. wgpu: A safe and portable GPU abstraction layer.
  58. bevy: A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine.
  59. glium: A safe and easy-to-use OpenGL wrapper.
  60. vulkano: A Rust wrapper for the Vulkan graphics API.
  61. glutin: A Rust wrapper for OpenGL, useful for windowing and contexts.
  62. rodio: A simple and easy-to-use audio playback library.
  63. nalgebra-glm: A GLSL-like math library for graphics.
  64. tui: A terminal user interface library.
  65. indicatif: A progress bar library.
  66. color-eyre: A colorful and context-aware error reporting crate.
  67. async-std: A community-driven, idiomatic async runtime.
  68. smol: A small and fast async runtime.
  69. tarpc: An RPC framework for Rust that uses tokio.
  70. prost: A Protocol Buffers implementation for Rust.
  71. grpcio: A gRPC library for Rust.
  72. jsonrpsee: A JSON-RPC 2.0 client/server implementation.
  73. validator: A lightweight library for validating data.
  74. argon2: Argon2 password hashing.
  75. uuid-b64: UUIDs encoded as Base64.
  76. csv: A CSV parsing and writing library.
  77. calamine: A pure Rust library for reading Excel files.
  78. polars: A blazing-fast DataFrame library written in Rust.
  79. ndarray: N-dimensional array for Rust.
  80. faiss-rs: Rust bindings to Facebook AI Similarity Search.
  81. tract: A neural network inference framework.
  82. candle: A machine learning framework.
  83. tch-rs: Rust bindings for Libtorch (PyTorch).
  84. cobertura: Code coverage data parsing.
  85. criterion: A benchmarking harness.
  86. proptest: A property-based testing framework.
  87. insta: A snapshot testing library.
  88. mockall: A mocking library for Rust.
  89. arbitrary: A data generation library for fuzzing and property testing.
  90. walkdir: Recursively walk a directory.
  91. fs_extra: Extended file system operations.
  92. zip: A zip archive creation and extraction library.
  93. tar: A tar archive creation and extraction library.
  94. xz2: Rust bindings to the liblzma library for XZ compression.
  95. lz4: LZ4 compression and decompression.
  96. crc32fast: Fast CRC32 computation.
  97. chrono-tz: Time zone definitions for chrono.
  98. ipnet: IP network address manipulation.
  99. nix: Rust bindings to Unix/Linux system calls.
  100. windows: Official Rust bindings for the Windows API.

This list attempts to cover a broad range of common use cases and essential utilities within the Rust ecosystem, reflecting both raw popularity and significant impact on development workflows.

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