Battery packs: Let's talk about crates, baby

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2026/07/15/battery-packs/

by MeetingsBrowser • 6 days ago

53 30 6 days ago

smallcultfollowing.com

two_handfuls• 5 days ago

For those struggling for context like me: this is about the Rust programming language.

wseqyrku2• 5 days ago

Off we go comparing battery packs.

Seriously though, I wish the dual futures, streams types to be consolidated first than building anything on top of the situation.

eptcyka• 5 days ago

Futures would be less of a problem if async was implemented as effect handling instead of coloring functions - I am truly miffed about e.g. not being to use `or_insert_with` with a fallible async function. That and build sandboxing are my 2 pie in the sky dreams for a rust edition far, far away.

wseqyrku2• 5 days ago

if async was implemented as effect handling

By any chance, was there a proposal for that I could read?

yjftsjthsd-h• 5 days ago

Battery packs are meant to address one of the most common things I hear from new Rust adopters. Everyone loves the wealth of high-quality crates available on crates.io. And everyone hates having to spend a bunch of time researching and comparing alternatives.
[...]
One of the key ideas from battery packs is that anybody can publish one.

So now we get to research and compare alternative battery packs? I guess it could help if there's fewer of them, but I don't see why that would be.

zem• 5 days ago

at the very least you could follow some trusted entity's recommendation for a bunch of crates at once. e.g. if the author of some large rust project like bevy published a battery pack I would pay attention because they have had to solve the problem of picking out several crates and seeing that they all work well together.

ho_lee_phuk• 5 days ago

Go ecosystems seems to choose quality over quantity (fewer higher-quality libraries) over Rust.

What seems to be causing this?

olalonde3• 5 days ago

I'd say ease of package management. You can see this with Python too.

inigyou3• 5 days ago

Package management is easier in Go than almost any other ecosystem, including Rust, Python and Javascript. And Go projects may have tens of package dependencies. Yet it's closer to a C++ project which has single-digit dependencies than a Javascript project which has tens of thousands.

whstl2• 5 days ago

Money dictates personal philosophies.

Rust and Node have too many deps because you can't make a Patreon or Github Sponsors page for contributions to stdlib.

Go is batteries-included because it was made by Google by people with a salary.

The people writing "thousands of small packages are good" are the people making money from the clout of having made thousands of small packages.

inigyou3• 5 days ago

What is Python?

rickdeckard• 5 days ago

The hobbyist device maker in me took waaay to long to be certain that this is NOT about physical batteries...

(was already confident, then there's suddenly a screenshot mentioning display components)

RunSet• 4 days ago

Reminds me of how calling wine prefixes "bottles" makes things easier to someone.

tomashubelbauer• 4 days ago

Homebrew is also great in this regard

cursuve• 3 days ago

Ha- same here! I was very excited to see a curated list of battery configurations/cells/wiring diagrams!

Levitating• 5 days ago

In my opinion this will just worsen the ecosystem. Many Rust crates are already bloated with dependencies.

assbuttbuttass• 5 days ago

Sounds like a great way to get dozens of dependencies before you even write a line of code

functionmouse• 5 days ago

It's about boosting attack surface. Trust the plan :)

tialaramex• 5 days ago

I hope one day to coincidentally have an earworm which works as sub-headings for something I want to write about.

cold_pizz4• 4 days ago

Everybody agrees that Rust's ecosystem is too fragmented, but I don't think that the solution proposed here will solve anything.

The most promising project to solve this problem is https://github.com/rust-stdx/stdx which is (more or less) re-creating Go's standard library in Rust.

jvanderbot• 4 days ago

You're advocating for one solution that has two problems:

* It is precisely what TFA goes in for: a one-stop shop (somewhat application dependent)

* It is antithetical to the "embarassment of riches" approach that Rust tried for when they delegated almost all functionality to crates - the ecosystem has proven fruitful

Oh and a third:

https://xkcd.com/927/

It seems to me that advocacy, writing good applications, or human-readable guides will do more for convergence on crate bundles than a more technical solution. I reach for the crates I know, not yet-another-framework.

chrismorgan• 4 days ago

The guy that is making stdx has been doing various shady stuff in his books and code which have resulted in all his stuff being banned on /r/rust. In stdx, he’s been forking good code, violating licenses, completely rewriting stuff with LLMs (including cryptography code, and definitely introducing bugs in the process)… it’s not a good approach.

efaref• 4 days ago

I guess the name is intending to evoke the "batteries included" metaphor, but it seems pretty terrible to me.

If we're sticking with the crates/cargo metaphor, surely this should be called a "pallet".

Arcuru• 4 days ago

Since I don't see it mentioned yet, https://blessed.rs seems to be pretty popular for finding common/recommended crates in the Rust ecosystem.

fleventynine• 4 days ago

I don't think this does enough to address to supply-chain security concerns. Before I use a crate, I want some assurance that the transitive deps have had a proper security audit, and that I'm not a single "cargo update" away from getting malware installed in my machine.

Battery packs: Let's talk about crates, baby

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