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rust-lang
crates.io-index
Tcl2015–2026
rust-lang / crates.io-index

crates.io-index

Registry index for crates.io

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
9Distinct people
13Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
759GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Registry index for crates.io

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year13 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-08-07 19:02:38 UTC to 2026-02-28 10:30:59 UTC.

01232015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

13 sources
ryangibb·Feb 28, 2026
> Presumably you mean compatible rather than incompatible there? I've edited for clarity, I mean "because packages with different major versions should have incompatible APIs anyway." > While you can specify upper bounds for the depdnency ranges, that is extremely uncommon in practice. In https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index I count just under 7000 upper bounds on dependency ranges that aren't just semver in disguise (e.g. not ">=1.0.0, <2.0.0"): $ rg --no-filename -o '"req":"[^"]*<[^"]*"' . | grep -Ev '< ?=? ?([0-9]+(\.0){0,2}|0\.[0-9]+(\.0)?)"' | wc -l 6727 So it's definitely used. One person's non-breaking change is another's breaking change https://xkcd.com/1172/
In Package Managers à la Carte: a formal model of dependency resolution
chriswarbo·Dec 25, 2024
> Package managers _are_ deterministic, but they also are reliant on the published package versions that match the listed constraints, _at the time the package manager ran and generated the lockfile_. Yes, that's why "version numbers" are basically documentation; unrelated to the actual files depended on by a build (e.g. try copying random junk into `~/.m2/repository`). Hence, if we want to use those names/versions to refer to particular files, we should specify the database we're using to do the lookup (AKA the repository's "index state"). > A dep listed as `foo: ^1.2.0` will match version 1.2.3 today. If 1.3.0 or 1.9.57 is published tomorrow, it will match that newer version. hackage.haskell.org lets us specify what "today" is, via a datetime https://cabal.readthedocs.io/en/3.4/cabal-project.html?highl... However, it's even better is to
Read the rest
use a database that's kept in version control. There's a third-party attempt to do this for Hackage, at https://github.com/commercialhaskell/all-cabal-hashes whereas crates.io does this natively at https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index
In Lock Files Considered Harmful
kibwen·Mar 1, 2023
There are sound technical reasons to give the index special treatment. First, the index is very large, and it only ever gets larger over time. I just cloned and compressed the crates.io index (https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index), which resulted in a 58 MB archive (note that I did remember to delete the .git directory). Second, the index changes very often. Every time anyone ever publishes a new version of a package, that changes the index. For crates.io, this happens hundreds or thousands of times per day. Third, the index is append-only. Fourth, the index is extremely frequently requested. Any time the user manually asks for an update, or any time the user adds a new dependency, the local copy of the index needs to be updated. Putting it all together, since the index is constantly changing and since users will constantly be ask
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ing for the latest version, this means that it would be very inefficient to serve the whole thing each time. Instead, a fine-grained solution is more efficient. In the early days of crates.io, this problem was solved by just storing the index in a git repo and letting git take care of fetching new diffs to the index (and the problem of "who pays for hosting" was solved by using Github). Now that the crates.io index is outgrowing this solution, it's moving to a more involved protocol where clients will not have local copies of the full index, but instead will only lazily fetch individual index entries as necessary, which is much faster (especially for fresh installs (including every CI run!)).
In GitHub Packages Is Down
hobofan·Jan 26, 2023
> If I'm not mistaken, it needs to download a package to know its dependencies and version constraints. It's even worse than that. It needs to execute a python script (setup.py?) per package to get a list of it's dependencies and constraints. As that script may contain arbitrary platform-dependent logic (and in the case of ML-related packages often does), it can be impossible to resolve dependencies for other platforms. > Not sure how other package managers avoid that. Maybe the central package repositories can expose the dependencies metadata without needing to download the actual package? Yes exactly. For dependency resolution, cargo uses only a git based index[0] which is optimized to contain only the information required for dependency resolution (omitting other package metadata such as e.g. authors). So it syncs the git repository an
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d after that it is just lookups in local files of the index. Only after dependency resolution does it need to consult an external server for retrieval of the actual package contents. [0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index
In Pip and cargo are not the same
mehrdadn·Jun 26, 2019
Update 2: Gave up on MSYS2 and just used rustup. Managed to compile and run, but exit() doesn't work. Also I just realized the executable contains the compilation path, which leaks private information? Makes it hard to compile and redistribute stuff, but otherwise I'd be very excited about the project. __________________________________________________ Update: Still can't get it to work. Also, the tool seems to download random third-party packages that aren't documented? > pyoxidizer run no existing PyOxidizer artifacts found processing config file pyoxidizer.toml resolving Python distribution... downloading https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone/releases/download/{...}/cpython-{...}.tar.zst ... error[E0463]: can't find crate for `std` | = note: the `x86_64-pc-windows-msvc` target may not be installed
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error: aborting due to previous error For more information about this error, try `rustc --explain E0463`. error: Could not compile `rand_core`. error: cargo build failed __________________________________________________ I ran 'cargo install pyoxidizer' and got cargo install pyoxidizer Updating registry `https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index` error: failed to parse manifest at `%USERPROFILE%\.cargo\registry\src\github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823\pyoxidizer-0.1.1\Cargo.toml` Caused by: editions are unstable Caused by: feature `edition` is required this Cargo does not support nightly features, but if you switch to nightly channel you can add `cargo-features = ["edition"]` to enable this feature Not sure where to go next... I'm not a Rust programmer and frustratingly I never seem to get Rust programs working on the first try. Do I have to download another version of Rust now? Why can't Rust just install the package? Edit: Would be nice if someone could also explain how this is a manifest parsing error?
In Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer
kibwen·May 30, 2018
Yes, I had overlooked that Go probably doesn't have anything like the crates.io index (https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index) to allow instant discovery of versioning metadata. And, AFAICT, even MVS would have the same problem here and would take the same time to resolve, since it still needs to access the network to fetch remote repos to discover versioning metadata; rather than pointing the finger at SAT solvers, it looks like vgo should be tackling Go's lack of a central package host (the vgo manifesto mentions "proxies", but it seems that those are just intended for solving the problem of persistent availability).
In The vgo proposal is accepted. Now what?
kibwen·May 7, 2017
I think you're misunderstanding the problem described in the OP. When you build a project via cargo using the default settings, it fetches the git repository at https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index to enable it to resolve dependencies locally. This git repository contains metadata for each library on crates.io, where the metadata for a given library is located in a file with the same name as the name of that library. When the OP uploaded a library whose name was an illegal filename on Windows, git unexpectedly choked when updating the local crate index repo, impacting all Windows users. It sounds like the concern you're describing is a different matter. It's likely true that if the source of a crate contains a file named "nul.rs", cargo on Windows will fail if it attempts to git-fetch the source (unless you're using Linux Subsyste
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m for Windows, anyway). While this would indeed be a problem, it would only affect users who elect to use specific libraries, rather than serving as a denial-of-service for every Rust user on Windows.
In I Broke Rust's Package Manager for Windows Users
steveklabnik·Apr 28, 2017
To be clear, you can use star dependencies locally, but pushing a new crate to `crates.io` will reject crates that have star dependencies. So in some senses this is still accurate, but it's missing the crates.io interaction. This means I don't understand how you got your error. For example: > cat .\Cargo.toml [package] name = "star" version = "0.1.0" authors = ["steveklabnik <steve@steveklabnik.com>"] [dependencies] semver="*" > cargo build Updating registry `https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index` Compiling semver-parser v0.7.0 Compiling semver v0.6.0 Compiling star v0.1.0 (file:///C:/Users/steve/tmp/star) Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 5.24 secs I've filed https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3971 I'm also not sure how you got your `join` error, let sline
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: Vec<&str> = vec![]; sline.join(""); seems to compile just fine for me. Hard to tell without seeing your other code, I guess...
In Rust 1.17
Animats·Aug 7, 2015
Well, as I usually do when a new Rust comes out, I tried recompiling some programs that used to work. So far, not so good: > cargo clean; cargo update; cargo build; Updating registry `https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index` Compiling libc v0.1.8 Compiling regex-syntax v0.2.1 Compiling memchr v0.1.3 Compiling aho-corasick v0.3.0 Compiling regex v0.1.41 /home/john/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-0a35038f75765ae4/regex-0.1.41/src/lib.rs:394:34: 394:51 error: #[feature] may not be used on the stable release channel /home/john/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-0a35038f75765ae4/regex-0.1.41/src/lib.rs:394 #![cfg_attr(feature = "pattern", feature(pattern))] ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ error: aborting due to previous error Could not compile `regex`. Looks like Rust 1.2 broke
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Rust's regular expression module. Somebody isn't running enough regression tests.
In Announcing Rust 1.2

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