Trusted Maintainers

The Rust ecosystem is built by thousands of contributors, but certain individuals and organizations have established exceptional reputations for creating and maintaining high-quality, widely-trusted libraries.

For new Rustaceans, understanding who maintains the crates you depend on can help you make informed decisions about which libraries to use in your projects.

David Tolnay

GitHub: dtolnay

Prolific Rust library author and maintainer. Core contributor to the Rust compiler and tooling.

Notable crates:

  • serde — The standard serialization framework
  • syn — Parser for Rust source code, essential for proc macros
  • quote — Code generation for proc macros
  • thiserror — Derive macro for error types
  • anyhow — Flexible error handling for applications
  • proc-macro2 — Wrapper around proc_macro for better ergonomics

David's crates are characterized by exceptional documentation, thoughtful API design, and comprehensive testing.

Andrew Gallant (BurntSushi)

GitHub: BurntSushi

Creator of ripgrep and author of numerous widely-used libraries.

Notable crates:

  • regex — Fast, Unicode-aware regular expressions
  • walkdir — Recursive directory traversal
  • jiff — Modern date and time library
  • csv — Fast CSV parser

Andrew's libraries are known for their performance, correctness, and extensive documentation. His blog posts often provide deep insights into Rust performance optimization.

Alex Crichton

GitHub: alexcrichton

Former Rust core team member and prolific contributor to foundational crates.

Notable crates:

  • toml — TOML parser
  • wasm-bindgen — Facilitating WebAssembly and JavaScript interop
  • Many foundational async and FFI crates in the ecosystem

Alex's contributions span compiler internals, tooling, and critical ecosystem infrastructure.

Sean McArthur

GitHub: seanmonstar

Creator and maintainer of core HTTP ecosystem libraries. Member of the Tokio team.

Notable crates:

  • hyper — Low-level HTTP library
  • reqwest — High-level HTTP client
  • tower — Service abstractions for building robust clients and servers

Sean's HTTP libraries form the foundation of most HTTP and web applications in Rust.

Ulrik Sverdrup (bluss)

GitHub: bluss

Author and maintainer of itertools and other iterator-focused utility crates.

Notable crates:

  • itertools — Extra iterator adaptors and methods

Servo Project

GitHub: servo

The Servo browser engine project, maintaining web-platform crates.

Notable crates:

  • url — URL parser
  • Many other web platform implementation crates

Aleksey Kladov

GitHub: matklad

Creator of rust-analyzer. Former Rust core team member.

Notable crates:

  • xshell — Ergonomic shell scripting in Rust

The Rust Project

GitHub: rust-lang

The official Rust project organization.

Maintains the Rust compiler, standard library, and core tooling:

  • rustc — The Rust compiler
  • cargo — Rust's package manager and build system
  • rustup — Rust toolchain installer
  • rustfmt — Code formatter
  • clippy — Linting tool
  • futures — Fundamental async primitives

All official Rust tooling is developed under this organization.

Tokio Project

GitHub: tokio-rs

Organization maintaining the async runtime ecosystem.

Notable crates:

  • tokio — Async runtime for writing reliable network applications
  • axum — Web application framework
  • tower — Library of modular and reusable components for networking
  • bytes — Utilities for working with bytes

The Tokio project provides the foundation for async programming in Rust, including runtime, I/O, and HTTP abstractions.

RustCrypto

GitHub: RustCrypto

Organization maintaining pure Rust implementations of cryptographic algorithms and protocols.

Notable crates:

  • sha2 — SHA-2 hash functions
  • Many other cryptographic primitives following uniform APIs

RustCrypto crates are characterized by rigorous security practices, constant-time implementations where appropriate, and comprehensive cryptographic algorithm coverage.

RustSec

GitHub: rustsec

Organization maintaining the Rust security advisory database and related security tooling.

Notable projects:

  • cargo-audit — Audits Cargo.lock for crates with security vulnerabilities
  • Rust Security Advisory Database

RustSec provides essential security infrastructure for the Rust ecosystem.

Recognition Criteria

Trusted maintainers are recognized based on:

  • Quality — Crates are well-designed, performant, and reliable
  • Documentation — Comprehensive docs and examples
  • Maintenance — Active development and responsive to issues
  • Community standing — Positive reputation in the Rust community
  • Impact — Widespread use and foundational importance

This is not an exhaustive list. Many other excellent maintainers contribute to the Rust ecosystem.