In RFC : Try-Catch Blocks, someone expressed concern over the discoverability of crates. To improve this situation, I suggested to have a “Crate of the Week” similar to TWIR’s “Quote of the Week”.
To jump-start this, I’m hereby asking you folks for nominations. We seek crates that are useful, unsung and/or ubercool!
@nasa42 Should we find a strong contender, I’d like to put a few lines on it in the next TWIR. If you like I can write them personally.
Serde. Serde Serde Serde. Sooooo many people are still erroneously using the universally inferior rustc_serialize crate, we need to be shouting Serde from the heavens.
@nasa42 Should we find a strong contender, I’d like to put a few lines on it
in the next TWIR. If you like I can write them personally.
@llogiq sure! 
I have long wanted a http://railscasts.com/ for Rust, which serves a similar purpose.
While I like the idea of “crate of the week”, i would love someone maintain a wiki/page of a “must use crates” and that would help crate discovery more, IMO.
Great initiative. The TWiR template already has a (never used) section reserved for this! Let’s do it! The biggest obstacle is that somebody needs to write something up (short) every week.
@nasa42, to keep this initiative rolling you might put in TWiR a link to this thread, similar to the quote thread.
Thanks!
I’ve already accepted the task. I think I’ll just file an issue against TWIR with the content, and @nasa42 can insert it into the text.
Unless another strong contender emerges until Sunday, I’m going to write about serde first, it seems.
I really like this idea but personally I’d rather see smaller lesser known crates which many may find useful. Even though I love crates like serde, I’d be surprised if a large number of Rustaceans didn’t know about it. Also it would take quite a few weeks to move past all the big ones in the same class as serde.
I mean, the whole idea is crate discovery after all 
As for ideas…I dont know, I’d suggest something like ansi_term.
I’d rather see smaller lesser known crates which many may find useful.
That was the idea. However, the goal is to provide value to the community, and I am with those who think advertising serde will very much do so, given that serialization is something a lot of programs can use. I also think ansi_term is a fairly specific crate restricted to applications that require colored terminal output. Advertising it will also provide value to the community, but only to the fraction of it that has this specific use case.
Still, your suggestion also provided value to at least 19 people, who have clicked your link. 
I like the fact that This Week in Rust just picks every single blog post, library, etc. that is posted to the forum or to reddit without any filter.
On the contrary I’m a bit reluctant to this idea of choosing a crate that is more or less “officially endorsed”.
I liked the “30 days of Rust” serie because it’s the author’s opinion. But TWiR is more or less the official newsletter of Rust, so I expect something more objective.
Rustlang’s twitter also mentions a lot of blog posts and crates, maybe not all of them.
It doesn’t have to be an endorsement, just any slightly interesting crate.
It seems the whole idea was inspired by a microcrate, and I think it’s a great idea to feature minuscle stuff. Maybe for example the unreachable crate to give another suggestion.
Thanks for your reply; I see that we should be careful not to give the Crate of the Week a too official taste. On the other hand, the “quote of the week” also wasn’t always official. Perhaps we should put the COTW directly before the QOTW.
Also @nasa42 can write some introductory text about how this is just a random selection, and means no endorsement from his employer or the Rust team, that the stated opinions are merely mine, yadda yadda yadda…
In the same range as serde, there’s capnproto-rust which comes with the following crates:
capnpcapnpccapnp-rpcI’d like to nominate sprocketnes because… well, it’s a NES emulator! I think it needs more love and is too hard to discover for new Rustaceans.
(sadly, the current master doesn’t compile. @steveklabnik’s PR should, though!)