Crates / borsh
Rust crate · real downloads · data Oct 24, 2026
borsh downloads, and should you depend on it?
Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing crates.io · docs.rs · repository
Owned on crates.io by nearprotocol-ci · ranked in best Rust crates for serialization formats · alternatives · is it still maintained?
Feature flags + Cargo.toml picker · Security history
Widely used and steady.
borsh: 1,483 crates depend on it; downloads don't spike on releases.
How this verdict is decided (4 rules)
- Usage: crates.io reverse dependencies (crates that list it as a dependency): 10,000+ = foundational, 1,000+ = widely used, 100+ = established, under 100 = few direct dependents.
- Direction: the median quiet day in the last 30 days of the window against the first 30, read against the median tracked crate (the whole field moved +39% from late summer to October, so a raw trend says nothing). 10%+ ahead of the field = gaining; 10%+ behind = losing ground; otherwise steady. Steady with no release in 2+ years = quiet for years.
- Release spikes: the median release-window day against the quiet-day baseline: under 1.15x = no spike, 1.15x to 1.3x = small bumps, 1.3x or more = jumps on release days.
- Release recency: days since the newest version that was not yanked, from crates.io publish times.
release window (release day + next day)quiet dayquiet-day median · download the 89 days as CSV
The numbers in one paragraphborsh got 62,034,785 crates.io downloads from Jul 27, 2026 to Oct 23, 2026. 2% of them landed within 2 days of one of its 1 release. On the other 87 quiet days it got a median of 674,146 a day, about 4,719,022 a week. Capping release days at that baseline leaves 61,941,058 release-adjusted downloads for the window.
What this means if you're choosing a dependency
- Well trodden. 1,483 crates depend on it, so common problems tend to have public answers and breaking changes get noticed fast.
- Actively released. 1.8.1 shipped 59 days ago (Aug 26, 2026).
- Fit check: license MIT OR Apache-2.0, edition 2018, needs Rust 1.77.0 or newer (from the latest version's manifest).
- Compare it by the baseline, not the raw count. 2% of its 62,034,785 downloads in the window landed within 2 days of a release; the steady number is 674,146 a day.
Alternatives that do a similar job
Crates that share its crates.io category or keywords, most similar first. Each line is the crate's own description, then how it compares on the same data.
Its place in the dependency graph
Built on borsh
10 of the 1000 crates we track depend on it directly (biggest first).
borsh builds on
Tracked crates its latest version (1.8.1) depends on (optional ones marked).
What the chart says
- Weekend quiet days ran at 58% of weekday quiet days (437,289 vs 751,754). A dip that deep is the signature of work-week CI pipelines and developers building on weekdays.
- Biggest day: 1,267,004 on Oct 22, 2026, a quiet day with no release nearby.
Every number
| All-time downloads | 219,886,815 (rank #552 on crates.io by all-time downloads) |
| Downloads in the window | 62,034,785 (Jul 27, 2026 to Oct 23, 2026, 89 days) |
| Within 2 days of a release | 1,442,019 (2.3%) |
| Quiet-day median (baseline) | 674,146 a day; weekdays 751,754, weekends 437,289 |
| Release-adjusted downloads | 61,941,058 (release-window days capped at the baseline) |
| Baseline rank | #534 of the 1000 crates we track |
| Quiet-day trend | +38% raw, -1% against the median tracked crate (+39%) |
| Releases in the window | 1 |
| Versions published, ever | 61 |
| Latest version | 1.8.1, published Aug 26, 2026 (license MIT OR Apache-2.0, edition 2018, MSRV 1.77.0) |
| First published | Aug 16, 2019 |
| Reverse dependencies | 1,483 |
Releases in the window
Each one opens a 2-day release window on the chart.
| Version | Published | Downloads that version got (lifetime) |
|---|---|---|
| 1.8.1 | Aug 26, 2026 | 12,059,057 |
How we compute this
crates.io counts every download, including CI runners, mirrors and bots that fetch each new version, so raw counts run high (why, in The Manual). We split the last 89 days into release windows (the day a version of borsh was published, plus the next day) and quiet days, and use the median quiet day as the baseline: an upper bound on steady use, never a head count. The method and data come from our study of 90 days of crates.io data from 69 crates, featured in This Week in Rust #674; check any crate live with the real-downloads checker.
Badge for your README
Maintainers can show the baseline in a README. It is optional, updates when we refresh the data, and links back here. Preview, then copy:
README, light
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Publishing a crate of your own? How to publish a Rust crate to crates.io, step by step.
Categories
Sources
- Daily downloads: crates.io API, /crates/borsh/downloads (last 90 days, all versions), fetched Oct 24, 2026.
- Versions and publish times: crates.io API, /crates/borsh/versions, same fetch.
- Reverse dependencies: crates.io reverse dependencies, same fetch. Dependency edges between tracked crates: each crate's default version, crates.io API.
- Fetched politely (one request every 2 seconds, identified User-Agent) per the crates.io data access policy. Data is crates.io's; the release-window split, baseline and verdict rules are ours, CC BY 4.0.
Up next
Next in network programming: Next in Network programming by real downloads: 649,200 a day, 308 dependents. Established and quiet for years.tokio-native-tlsRust crate. An implementation of TLS/SSL streams for Tokio using native-tls giving an implementation of TLS for nonblocking I/O streams. Real use: 649K downloads a day...Read it next →Also worth your time