Rust Community Chooses Best Libraries of 2024: Voting Results

Rust Community Chooses Best Libraries of 2024: Who Won?

Every year, the Rust developer community holds a traditional vote, “Rust Libs of the Year”, to highlight the most useful, innovative, and popular crates (libraries). In 2024, the competition was particularly fierce: the shortlist included dozens of projects solving tasks from web development to machine learning. We've gathered the main winners in key categories.

🥇 Winners in Main Categories

• Best library for web development: Axum — an async web framework from the Tokio team. Axum continues to gain momentum thanks to its ergonomic API, excellent documentation, and tight integration with the Tower ecosystem. It surpassed Actix-web and Warp, becoming the top choice for new projects.
• Best library for CLI: Clap — the de facto standard for creating command-line interfaces. This year, developers released version 4.5 with improved support for derive macros and automatic man-page generation.
• Best library for parsing: Nom — despite the emergence of new competitors (Pest, winnow), Nom remains a favorite due to its speed and flexibility in parsing binary data and text.
• Best library for async: Tokio — the undisputed leader. Every update makes it even more performant. In 2024, the Tokio team optimized I/O handling and added experimental support for io_uring on Linux.
• Best library for AI/ML: Candle — a minimalist machine learning framework from Hugging Face. It allows running models (LLM, CNN) directly on CPU and GPU without Python dependencies, which is critical for edge devices.

🏆 Special Nominations and Surprising Discoveries

In addition to the main categories, the community highlighted several projects that have changed developers' daily work:

• Best testing tool: Insta — a library for snapshot testing that automatically checks function output. It has become indispensable in projects with frequently changing data.
• Best library for GUI: Egui — an immediate mode GUI for desktop and web applications. In 2024, version 0.27 was released with multi-window support and improved rendering performance.
• Best data crate: Polars — a Rust equivalent of pandas that is often 10-20 times faster. This year, it added support for streaming processing and improved integration with Apache Arrow.
• Best newcomer of the year: Ruff — an ultra-fast linter and formatter for Python, written in Rust. Although it is not a Rust library, the community highly appreciated Rust's impact on the ecosystem of other languages.

💡 Why This Matters for Python Developers

Rust and Python increasingly work in tandem. Many of the listed libraries (Polars, Candle, Ruff) are either used directly in Python via PyO3 or inspire the creation of similar tools. Learning about the best Rust crates will help you write