Glossary / Rust and crates
Glossary · Rust and crates · checked Oct 24, 2026
Reverse dependencies
Short answerA crate's reverse dependencies are the other published crates that list it as a dependency. crates.io shows the count on every crate page.
Why it matters
It is a better adoption signal than downloads: a reverse dependency is a maintainer choosing the crate on purpose, while a download can be a CI cache miss.
Our number
Most depended-on crates we track: serde (133,588), serde_json (113,141), tokio (78,796).
Go deeper on this site
Where it shows up here
It appears on 382 pages of this site: 375 Crate pages, 4 Articles, 1 The Manual, 1 Guide, 1 path. A few to start with:
- Rust, LLMs, AI agents and app dev, with the receipts.
- crates.io download count: 80% of ours arrived with a new version
- Q.Why are crates.io download counts inflated?
- How to publish a Rust crate to crates.io
- Real downloads for the top 300 Rust crates
- addr2line downloads, and should you depend on it?
- Rust crate data, start to finish.
Sources
- crates.io reverse dependencies (serde): crates.io/crates/serde/reverse_dependencies (checked Oct 24, 2026)
Related terms
Up next
Go deeperReverse dependencies for every tracked crateThe page on this site that does the most with this term.Read it next →Did this answer your question?