Rust Community Chooses Best Libraries of the Year: 2023 Results

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The Rust Community Has Chosen the Best Libraries of the Year

Every year, the Rust community holds a vote for the best libraries (crates) of the year. In 2023, thousands of developers participated, determining the winners in eight categories. We have compiled the key results so you can stay up to date with the most in-demand tools in the Rust ecosystem.

Winners of 2023

The vote covered both fundamental categories (logging, CLI) and specialized ones (WebAssembly, scientific computing). Here are the main winners:

Best crate for CLI applications — clap. For several years in a row, the library for parsing command-line arguments remains the de facto standard. Version 4.x added support for derive macros and improved error messages.
Best web framework — axum. Created by the Tokio team, it surpassed Actix Web thanks to its ergonomic API and full compatibility with the Tower ecosystem.
Best library for working with data — polars. A fast Rust alternative to Pandas, gaining popularity in data engineering due to its speed when working with large datasets.
Best library for WebAssembly — wasm-bindgen. A key tool for integrating Rust code with JavaScript, allowing you to compile high-performance modules for the browser.
Best library for asynchronous programming — tokio. Modern Rust is unimaginable without it: it is the foundation for web servers, network utilities, and microservices.
Best library for logging — tracing. The new standard for structured logging and tracing, which has replaced the outdated log.
Best library for working with JSON — serde_json. Paired with the serde crate, it remains the most popular way for data serialization/deserialization.
Best library for scientific computing — nalgebra. Linear algebra, matrices, and vectors for machine learning and computer graphics.

Why is this important for Python developers?

Rust and Python are increasingly working in tandem: Rust libraries (e.g., pydantic-core or ruff) are used inside Python tools for acceleration. Knowing the best Rust crates will help you:

Write fast CLI utilities that will replace slow Python scripts.
Create Python extensions in Rust using pyo3 (by the way, it was also on the shortlist).
Understand how modern data tools like Polars or Apache Arrow are built.

Trends of the Year

The main takeaway from the vote is that the Rust community is increasingly moving from low-level utilities to frameworks for the web and data. axum and polars are a clear example of how Rust is becoming a universal language not only for systems programming but also for application programming.

The full list of nominees and voting statistics can be found in the official repository