How do you select crates on crates.io?

How to make sure a crate is stable, fast, properly tested, supported etc...?

Is there some sort of "official" crates ?

Personnally i look at how many times the crate has been downloaded...

Pretty much the same way one evaluates any library open source or commercial.

Get a feel for how widely used it is. Is there likely to be community support if the original dev drops out of the scene?
Do some detective work on the developers. Who are they? What else have they done? Are they in it for the long haul?
Sniff around the repo. How old is this project? Is it currently seeing any maintenance? Does it have tests and good documentation.
Here is a biggie: Are there any major projects and/or organizations using that crate. If so there is a good chance they will have a vested interest in it being bug free and long lived.
Try it out.

No hard and fast rules. Just do your homework.

I think an "official" crates collection would be a bad idea. Who would be the officials that want to carry the responsibility of all that quality checking and maintenance.

It's divisive. MyWidgetThing might be as good as or better than YourWidgetThing but for some reason does not get the stamp of approval. I might be miffed in such a situation. Users might be steered away from what is better for them.

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Category listings on https://lib.rs use its ranking algorithm, so crates that are listed near the top are likely to be high quality and well-maintained.

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