They probably meant reqwest (https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest), not request. Reqwest is maintained by the same developer (seanmonstar) as hyper, the de facto standard http library.

Ah, I did. I posted that on my phone. Autocorrect strikes again.

Because it's "reqwest", not "request".

All these libraries are very well known within the community and are what I would come up with as a complete outsider (I don't think I've written more than a hundred lines of Rust code to this date).

You can also find some pointers here:

https://github.com/rust-unofficial/awesome-rust

https://lib.rs

There's actually a more official resource: the rust cookbook[0]. This is maintained by the rust-lang team (rust-lang-nursery is an official place for crates maintained by the rust language maintainers).

[0]: https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/

That sounds like something that could be solved by having crates.io provide a curated list of common popular crates for certain features. That is, this seems to be mostly a documentation issue.

This was attempted by the Libz Blitz back in 2017. See the rust-cookbook: https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/ .

I agree that this should be better documented and probably more integrated with crates.io somehow.

It’s really a reputation bootstrapping problem, for which popularity can be a useful proxy. For me to use third-party code, I have to trust that the future behavior of the developers will be reasonable: I want my side projects that don’t get touched for months or years to still mostly work when I get back around to them.

Not everyone or every project will have the same desires, though. Sometimes, a fast-moving experimental library is the right choice. The trouble is figuring out which I’m looking at.

I'm not sure I follow these concerns about "working in the future" - as long as you specify versions that work for you in your Cargo.toml file, that should work at any point in the future given that you use Rust 1.x.

If you'll want to update to always be on the latest version of each crate, well that discomfort about them potentially not working is part of the price.

If I come back to something, it’s because I want to resume active development. Keeping a dependency pinned at an old version makes that more difficult in various ways, so I personally value forward compatibility.

Not everyone does, and that’s fine. I just want to know what a library developer’s stance on it is before I try to use their library.

Anyone can search for "awesome [lang]" when they want such a thing.