How can rust have so many packages and large standard library in a few years?

How can rust have so many packages and large standard library in a few years after publishing when it's popularity has grown in 2015 specialy :roll_eyes: :interrobang:

Because even prior to 2015, many highly productive people contributed things that they thought Rust needed to be successful. https://thanks.rust-lang.org/ alone shows 8,014 people who've contributed to the compiler and the standard library, and that ignores all the people who've put up awesome code on crates.io.

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I'm not sure I understand the question? Could you re-word it?

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Rust was conceived in 2007. It's 16 years old. It's not exactly a young language.

(Also note that Rust's standard library is not really big, compared to some other languages like Python for example. The key thing is not that it's big, but that it serves the most important needs of most programmers.)

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Thanks for your reply that gave me some awesome information :purple_heart:,

According to your reply i continue asking bard about crates.io,
how many people do contribute to crates.io?
he gave me that,

As of May 16, 2023, there are 10,592 people who have contributed to Rust in crates.io. This number includes both individuals and organizations. The most active contributors are:

  • Mozilla (4,353 contributions)
  • The Rust Foundation (1,256 contributions)
  • Amazon (666 contributions)
  • Google (573 contributions)
  • Microsoft (475 contributions)

So,10,592 devloper that creates 114,593 crates in stock.
should i consider this crates.io have a lot of crates according to number of contributors?

Sorry for my English:joy:, It's not my native language :purple_heart:

Thanks for your reply :purple_heart:

  • What you have said is true but, I think that rust was published in May 15, 2010.

  • That means it's 13 years old and these 3 years will make a huge difference in supporting this language, number of crates and you know every day in tech industry (a new framework will be published or new feature etc...)

  • python's age is 32 years old and that's why it has alot of packages including popularity of this lang.

I agree with about your quote that says

The key thing is not that it's big, but that it serves the most important needs of most programmers.

again, thank you for your help :purple_heart:

I wouldn't trust Bard to get the total number of contributors to crates right - when I look at the crates.io database dump, I see over 29,000 crates.io users - people who've created accounts on crates.io (which is only needed if you want to publish crates there). And that ignores people who've contributed to crates published on crates.io but who've not created their own crates.io account.

Fundamentally, though, the reason there's so much Rust out there is that Rust has attracted a community of very productive people, who've shared their work with the world - and that entire community deserves praise.

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I mean, In 13 years there 114,593 crates and large standard library.

how come rust have these variety of crates including (std) :interrobang:

Two reasons:

  • Rust language and tooling were explicitly optimized for exactly this outcome. I’ve touched on it in Rust Is a Scalable Language
  • For open source, total amount of work is not the limiting factor, what matters rather is how easy it is to parallelize the work across unbounded number of contributors. It routinely happens that a new, more decentralized ecosystem quickly outgrows older ones. My favorite example here would be Emacs and VS Code, where Code today has far more packages than Emacs, despite being many times younger.
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I think there has been a huge number of skilled and enthusiastic software engineers, who have been working with all kind of languages for years, who saw the possibilities of this new fangled language that offered features they had been missing and no other language has emphasised since ALGOL and Ada. That being putting correctness and performance as top priorities. Not to mention all the other niceties Rust has and the Cargo ecosystem. So they embraced Rust immediately.

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