Besides, given the extreme signal:noise ratio of codebases that gain notoriety most projects that share a name or acronym will only have a handful of users even aware of both's existence.
It's difficult because it's easy to miss obscure social niches and name variants, and that's why most people make the task easier with an effort to find unique names.
For example, a sloppy google search for "Rx" yields, in search result order:
- two medical abbreviation, for "recipe" (i.e. "take") in medical prescriptions and for radiography: benign but common and used in proper names of pharmacies, labs etc.;
- Radeon RX-something video cards, unlikely to be confused but likely to yield search result noise for something related to videogames;
- some Lexus cars, popular but more harmless;
- iZotope RX 7, a major software entry: professional "audio repair" DAW plugins from a popular company;
- several unimportant random product and company names, including e.g. some Sony headphones, that collectively prove how "Rx" is an inappropriately short name.
A longer and more unique name would clearly be a better choice. But a further web search for "rx pixel" yields an awful lot of medical video card and car results and a frontal collision on Twitter, where dr. Jennifer Hazel goes by "@Rx_Pixel".
Searching for "rx editor" is also interesting:
- a deluge of iZotope RX results (no hope to become more popular, low-resolution image editors are a smaller niche than audio production)
- the highly popular RxJS JavaScript library. It doesn't take a JavaScript expert to figure out that it's highly popular: the home page mentions a conference about it.
This last conflict should be enough to veto the name "Rx", even without more targeted searches (e.g. social media) and less online-visible usages (e.g. in telecommunications as an abbreviation of receiver or reception, paired with "Tx" for transmitter or transmission).
Many Rust projects are blah-rs where the rs is dropped in the crate name. So it would be normal to be confused and think Rx == RxRust. e.g. https://github.com/rust-lang/futures-rs has crate name "futures".
>There's not that many good, short names.
There'd be loads if the Rust community (or.. the 'rust parliamentary community' (people who actually get involved in the RFC processes and see things through to the end (heroes, imo)) (cf PLP[0])) elected to use namespaces for crates.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_Labour_Party
Then the movie dispicable me came out, then the Minions movie, and now we are off on page 11.
I would also recommend choosing a less overloaded name. Searching for "rx" in Google brings up prescription-related results.