If we go down the route of a small standard library which seems to go with Rust's 'pay only for what you use' mentality, we do need to have a way to highlight great crates in certain areas.
At the moment we have a reasonable amount of crates but the quantity is growing all the time. A new user needs to know not just that it's production quality (version >= 1) but also whether its a good choice.
As we're not having batteries included could we have a batteries recommended approach?
Possibly something like this for crates:
(but with a bit more curation care.)
We all collectively have a lot of knowledge that would be good for new rustations to be able to tap into when they're starting out or branching into an area they've not been into before. At the moment we ad-hoc ask in forums what's a good crate for X. I wonder can we formalise that?
Maybe crates should allow user reviews: "I used Serde 0.9 but it ate my hamster" - feedback from the field of how they used a crate could be helpful and a great source of tips.