Glossary / Rust and crates
Glossary · Rust and crates · checked Oct 24, 2026
Crate (Rust)
Short answerA crate is the unit Rust compiles and shares: one library or one binary, with its own Cargo.toml. Published crates live on crates.io and are what you list under [dependencies].
Why it matters
Picking a crate is picking code you will ship and maintain. Download counts, release history and reverse dependencies are the public signals of how widely it is used.
Our number
We track the 300 most-downloaded crates. The biggest, hashbrown, has 2,826,725,908 all-time downloads on crates.io.
Go deeper on this site
Where it shows up here
It appears on 418 pages of this site: 376 Crate pages, 17 Articles, 5 Guides, 5 paths, 4 The Manual, 4 Free tools, 1 about, 1 Service, 1 developer, 1 distribution, 1 Open source, 1 Report, 1 service. A few to start with:
- Rust, LLMs, AI agents and app dev, with the receipts.
- Bevy instancing: drawing 639,000 units with one draw call per mesh
- The Manual.
- Q.Why are crates.io download counts inflated?
- Step-by-step guides.
- How to create an App Store Connect API key and use it in CI
- How many real users does your crate have?
- JSON to Rust struct.
Sources
- The Rust Book, Packages and Crates: doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch07-01-packages-and-crates.html (checked Oct 24, 2026)
Related terms
Up next
Go deeperReal downloads for the top Rust cratesThe page on this site that does the most with this term.Read it next →Did this answer your question?