AWaw1621107·May 7, 2025
> speaking of which, according to another C++ talk, something like 60% of rust crates are dependent on unsafe rust.
It's probably not the source of the stats you had in mind since it's discussing something slightly different, but the Rust Foundation built a tool called Painter [0] for this kind of analysis. According to that [1]:
> As of May 2024, there are about 145,000 crates; of which, approximately 127,000 contain significant code. Of those 127,000 crates, 24,362 make use of the unsafe keyword, which is 19.11% of all crates. And 34.35% make a direct function call into another crate that uses the unsafe keyword. Nearly 20% of all crates have at least one instance of the unsafe keyword, a non-trivial number.
> Most of these Unsafe Rust uses are calls into existing third-party non-Rust language code or libraries, such as C or C++.
To be
Read the rest
honest, I would have expected that 60% number to be higher if it were counting unsafe anywhere due to unsafe in the stdlib for vocabulary types and for (presumably) common operations like iterator chains. There's also a whole other argument that the hardware is unsafe so all Rust code will depend on unsafe somewhere or another to run on actual hardware, but that's probably getting a bit into the weeds.
[0]: https://github.com/rustfoundation/painter
[1]: https://rustfoundation.org/media/unsafe-rust-in-the-wild-not...