Crates / puffin
Rust crate · real downloads · data Oct 27, 2026
puffin downloads, and should you depend on it?
Simple instrumentation profiler for games crates.io · docs.rs · repository
alternatives · is it still maintained?
Few direct dependents and losing ground.
puffin: only 88 crates name it directly; most of its downloads come in through profiling and rerun; no release in the last 90 days, so its count is all steady use.
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 paragraphpuffin got 1,336,588 crates.io downloads from Jul 30, 2026 to Oct 26, 2026 with no new version in that window, so every day is a quiet day: a median of 16,490 a day, about 115,430 a week. With no release spikes to remove, its whole count is the steady baseline.
What this means if you're choosing a dependency
- You rarely add this one yourself. Only 88 crates name it directly; its downloads arrive through profiling, rerun.
- Released this year. The latest version, 0.20.0, is from Mar 18, 2026 (7 months ago).
- Still pre-1.0 (0.20.0). Under Cargo's semver rules a 0.x minor bump may break you, so pin the minor version (
puffin = "0.20") and read the changelog on upgrades. - Fit check: license MIT OR Apache-2.0, edition 2024, needs Rust 1.92.0 or newer (from the latest version's manifest).
- Its raw count is a fair read. Under 1% of its downloads in the window came from release windows, so the raw number and the baseline (16,490 a day) tell the same story.
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.
What the chart says
- Weekend quiet days ran at 41% of weekday quiet days (7,229 vs 17,655). A dip that deep is the signature of work-week CI pipelines and developers building on weekdays.
- Biggest day: 40,719 on Oct 21, 2026, a quiet day with no release nearby.
Every number
| All-time downloads | 6,428,100 (outside the crates.io top 1,000 by all-time downloads) |
| Downloads in the window | 1,336,588 (Jul 30, 2026 to Oct 26, 2026, 89 days) |
| Within 2 days of a release | 0 (0.0%) |
| Quiet-day median (baseline) | 16,490 a day; weekdays 17,655, weekends 7,229 |
| Release-adjusted downloads | 1,336,588 (release-window days capped at the baseline) |
| Baseline rank | #1149 of the 1329 crates we track |
| Quiet-day trend | +0% raw, -28% against the median tracked crate (+39%) |
| Releases in the window | 0 |
| Versions published, ever | 35 |
| Latest version | 0.20.0, published Mar 18, 2026 (license MIT OR Apache-2.0, edition 2024, MSRV 1.92.0) |
| First published | Aug 10, 2020 |
| Reverse dependencies | 88 |
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 puffin 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:
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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/puffin/downloads (last 90 days, all versions), fetched Oct 27, 2026.
- Versions and publish times: crates.io API, /crates/puffin/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 profiling: Next in Profiling by real downloads: 6,715 a day, 120 dependents. Established and gaining.iai-callgrindRust crate. High-precision and consistent benchmarking framework/harness for Rust. Real use: 6.7K downloads a day on quiet days; 120 crates depend on it.Read it next →Also worth your time
Art: Nicholas Roerich, Nag Lake (1925). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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