Ecosystem

Before you start your project, you may need to put some throughts towards what kind of project you want to build, and choose the right ecosystem.

Rust has a vibrant community of all kinds of projects, usually over time certain crates become more popular and establish themselves as the go-to. You should certainly make use of the ecosystem and the ease with which Cargo lets you add and manage dependencies.

Rust can also target a wide variety of platforms: whether you are writing code to run on GPUs, in the browser, on servers, in the terminal, inside your bootloder, on embedded devices or on unusual platforms, Rust typically has you covered.

Most of the time, it is relatively easy to switch between different crates. However, in some cases the crates you decide to use have an influence over the architecture of your project. For example, it is not always so easy to convert a blocking, threaded application into an async one, or to switch from one web framework to another.

It is usually better to put some thought into this before you start developing, because it might be difficult to switch once you’ve already invested in building your project with one ecosystem. This sections aims at showing you the Rust ecosystem for some common tasks, wherever the choices you make have a large impact on the architecture of your project.

Reading

On Dependency Usage in Rust (archived) by Lander Brandt

The C programming language is often critizied for not bringing a lot of foundational data structures out-of-the-box, leading many developers to reinvent the wheel. Adding and managing dependencies in C/C++ is difficult, because there is no standardized build system. On the other hand, in JavaScript it is so easy to add dependencies, that many small projects end up with gigabytes worth of trivial (transitive dependencies), which is criticized as a security risk. This article explains how dependencies work in Rust, and why it’s okay to use them.

Statistics on the Rust ecosystem

Lib.rs publishes some interesting graphics of the Rust ecosystem.