Like every package repository (or human endeavor in general) it follows Sturgeon's Law: 80% of everything is crap. That said, there's 100k crates on crates.io, and many of them are fantastic (well-supported, actively developed, documented, etc.). For a new user, understanding which are high-quality is a daunting task, and is expedited by just asking an experienced person for specific recommendations.

Honestly if you're writing Rust, just stick with the top 100 downloaded packages, and you'll be fine. That's basically what I do, unless the tasks requires quite specialized work.

Didn’t expect to see such harsh criticism of the Rust ecosystem by this user.

Contrary to the memes, a lot of long running Rust users are happy to tell you about where Rust is deficient.

Not what I meant.

What did you mean?

Fine. I imagine someone posting that they just published their first ever crate. Maybe it’s the first and only Rust binding to some useful library. But cool your horses, this poster says (by implication), because 80% of everything is crap. Of course no one says that out loud. But that is the inevitable conclusion.

Maybe the main point of four average Rust users publishing a crate each is so that burntsushi can publish one great one.

(for whatever it's worth, im not sure why you are downvoted in reply to me; I had upvoted you.)

It could look curt so I can understand it. Thanks.

Although I cannot comment on this specifically for Rust, what I would confidently say is that one of the best methods for finding the “best” dependencies in any language is to read lots of code. Find the popular and/or most useful projects written in the language on GitHub and see which dependencies that project uses and how they are used. At least in my career this method has served me well. For a given problem domain I was able to quickly identify the best/most popular packages to use by reading the code that was heavily used by others. Obviously the more you do this the easier it becomes.

Julia's engineering is notoriously low quality (perhaps because it's more popular for scientific code). Almost any other language has a higher bar for what level of best practices is normal, IME.

I don't know how it's in general, but the few Rust packages I checked seem to be of very high quality.