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My curated list of cool/useful crates for game development. Crates often have strange names that are difficult to remember or do not make it obvious what they do. This repository is where I keep track of crates I've found that may be useful for certain problems or projects.
From windows to graphics contexts to images and fonts.
Crate
Description
ab_glyph great for parsing and rasterizing opentype fonts and generating glyph sets for rendering
crunch space-efficient rectangle packer
euc simple and to-the-point software renderer, good for debugging or tooling, and also as studying material
glow nice OpenGL bindings/wrapper
glsl glsl 450/460 parser, which creates a syntax tree out of opengl shader code, very simple to use and navigate
image very full-featured image decoding library with support for lots of common formats
lyon very nice path tesselation library, for generating meshes from vector contours/paths
msdf generate multi-signed distance fields out of contours, good for generating + baking textures for fast, scalable fonts
naga great companion to wgpu, a shader parser that can parse and translate shaders. i've found it useful for evaluating shaders to automate some of the graphics code, as well as validating shaders' compatibility for engines/targets
palette provides type-correct color types and conversions (RGB, HSV, LAB, etc.)
png the image crate is very large, so for merely PNG support, using this directly makes for a faster compile and smaller dependency footprint
wgpu extremely powerful+sophisticated web-gpu cross platform rendering library, can output to metal/vulkan/dx/wasm, has its own shader language. the whole deal, very good
winit the de-factor windowing library for rust, quite good compared to what i've used in any other language. feels very much like using SDL
Crate
Description
bincode very fast + compact binary serializer, output is nearly same size as in-memory structs, great for simple inline serialization
kdl serializer for KDL a small, clean document language with xml-like semantics
musli fast, generic binary serialization in the vein of serde (similar to bincode)
toml a serializer for TOML files, used by Rust and a nice simple config format
Sometimes you just gotta buncha bytes to manipulate.
Crate
Description
bitflags generates flags enums with well-defined semantics and ergonomic end-user APIs
bytemuck library with traits/methods for making your structs readable/writable as byte arrays, useful for uploading them into graphics APIs like wgpu or opengl
byteorder convenience methods for encoding and decoding numbers in either big-endian or little-endian order (useful for binary encoders/decoders)
memoffset nice companion to bytemuck, allows you to get memory offsets of struct fields, useful for setting up vertex attributes or uniform buffers for graphics APIs
zune-inflate an extremely optimized inflate algorithm supporting whole buffer decompression
Sometimes game objects just need to move and touch each other.
Crate
Description
approx floating point approximation, great for those times where pesky f32's are deciding to be never quite equal. should be used in place of direct equality checking as often possible
glam my current favorite of the fast linear algebra (vectors, matrices, etc.) crates, designed for games/graphics, and has some SIMD-support
mint interoperability layer between math types of different graphics APIs
Editors often need to interact with the OS in ways games don't.
Crate
Description
arboard text/image clipboard support, useful for editors/etc. especially because of the image support
rfd rust file-dialogs, useful for native save/load/etc. for editors and tooling
vfs file system abstractions that allows using different filesystem implementations (eg. in-memory filesystem)
camino utf8 paths and pathbufs, great for those of us who never deal with non-string paths
Rolling your own implementation of these things tends to go badly.
Crate
Description
compact_str drop-in replacement for String that stores up to 24-byte strings on the stack
heck provide conversions between different naming cases (eg. snake_case to UpperCamelCase or SHOUTY_SNAKE_CASE)
strsim various string similarity implementations (good for editor search fields, etc.)
unicode_blocks a list of all unicode blocks and provides some functions to search across them
Games need random numbers, and Rust has many RNG crates. Here are some I like.
Crate
Description
fastrand simple, fast random number generator that uses a 64-bit state
rand_xoshiro very nice random number generators, i specifically like SplitMix64 for being very simple, fast, and with a simple 64-bit state, but it has more sophisticated generators available as well
Collections & Smart Pointers
Crate
Description
pared projected shared pointers (eg. get a "shared" reference to a field of a struct in an Rc)
slotmap provides 3 containers with persistent unique keys to access stored values (basically a hash-map that generates keys for you and has O(1) lookup time)
Haven't figured out how to categorize this stuff yet, but some of these are extremely useful.
Crate
Description
ahash very fast, non-cryptographically secure hashing algorithm
gilrs gamepad input library, really great API, controller layout/bindings/event handling, and haptic support
strum add lots of reflection to enums (names, count, enumerate over their values, etc.), great to remove boilerplate and prepare enums for in-editor dropdown support
thiserror my favorite library for creating error structs/enums with nice display implementations (reduces lots of boilerplate and can generate from-impls as well, etc.)
ulid i like this for guid generation, which uses the ulid specification to generate 128-bit unique IDs that have nice string representations
bevy_ecs A highly ergonomic and fast entity component system with support for parallel scheduling and event propagation