Rust Community Chooses Best Libraries of 2023: Awards Results

Rust Community Names Best Libraries of 2023: Who Won?

At the end of 2023, the Rust community summed up the results of the annual Rust Libs Awards, selecting the best libraries and tools in 11 categories. Voting took place on GitHub and social networks, gathering a record number of participants — over 15,000 developers. We have collected the key winners that everyone working with Rust should know about.

Main Winners by Category

• Best Web Development Library — Axum (0.7.x). This framework from the Tokio team continues to dominate thanks to its ergonomic API, excellent performance, and tight integration with the async ecosystem. It surpassed Actix-web and Rocket.
• Best CLI Tool — clap (v4). The de facto standard for command-line argument parsing. In 2023, version 4.4 was released with support for derive macros for complex structures.
• Best HTTP Client — reqwest. A simple and powerful library for making HTTP requests, which was updated to version 0.12 with improved TLS and WebSocket support.
• Best Data Processing Tool — Polars. A DataFrame library that has become a serious competitor to Pandas. In 2023, version 0.35 was released with lazy evaluation and integration with Apache Arrow.
• Best JSON Library — serde_json. The perennial leader thanks to seamless integration with the serde crate. Supports zero-copy deserialization.
• Best Testing Tool — cargo-nextest. A utility for running tests in parallel, which in 2023 gained support for filtering and JUnit format reports.
• Best GUI Library — egui. An immediate mode GUI framework actively used in games and tools. Version 0.26 brought WebGPU support.

Special Nominations

In addition to the main categories, the community recognized several projects that significantly impacted the ecosystem:

• Breakthrough of the Year — Bevy (game engine). Version 0.12 introduced an ECS architecture and a scene editor, making Bevy a real competitor to Unity and Godot.
• Best Contribution to Security — cargo-audit. A tool for checking vulnerabilities in dependencies. In 2023, support for supply chain analysis was added.
• Best AI/ML Library — candle from Hugging Face. A minimalist ML framework in Rust, optimized for CPU and GPU (CUDA/Metal).

Why This Matters for Developers

The community's choice reflects the trends of 2023: Rust is increasingly used in web backends (Axum), data processing (Polars), and even game development (Bevy). The winning libraries are characterized by high performance, strong typing, and memory safety — precisely the qualities for which Rust is valued.

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