July 17, 2026
Included drama not included
Battery packs: Let's talk about crates, baby
Rust’s new “battery packs” promise easier picks, but the comments instantly turned into chaos
TLDR: Rust is testing “battery packs,” community-made starter bundles meant to help people choose useful add-ons faster. Commenters immediately split between “finally, a shortcut” and “great, now we have bundles to compare too,” with bonus confusion from readers who thought this was about actual batteries.
Rust, a programming language famous for having tons of community-made add-ons, just got a shiny new idea: “battery packs,” or curated bundles of recommended tools for common jobs like building command-line apps, web backends, or embedded gadgets. In plain English, it’s supposed to save newcomers from falling into a black hole of endless comparisons on crates.io, Rust’s package catalog. But the comments? Oh, they smelled irony immediately.
The loudest reaction was basically: “Wait… the fix for too many choices is… more lists of choices?” One commenter deadpanned that instead of researching and comparing libraries, now people get to research and compare battery packs. Ouch. Another jumped straight to an old community sore spot, arguing that Rust should clean up overlapping tools first before layering new recommendation bundles on top. Translation for non-experts: some users think the ecosystem already has too many nearly-similar options, and this doesn’t magically solve that.
Then came the comedy. One poor soul confessed it took them way too long to realize this was not about literal batteries, while another had to post a rescue note for confused readers: yes, this is about the Rust programming language. And in one of the thread’s spiciest side-eyes, someone contrasted Rust with Go, saying Go seems to favor fewer, more polished libraries. So while the blog post sells battery packs as friendly starter kits, the comment section turned it into a deliciously messy debate about curation, choice overload, and whether Rust is helping beginners—or just inventing a cuter label for confusion.
Key Points
- •The article proposes “battery packs” as curated sets of Rust crates grouped by common themes such as CLI, backend services, embedded development, and error handling.
- •A prototype tool is available now through `cargo-bp`, with commands to list packs and add recommended libraries to a project.
- •Battery packs are published as crates, with dependencies representing recommendations, features grouping related crates, and examples serving as templates.
- •The design is intentionally open so that anyone can publish a battery pack tailored to a specific domain or technical requirement.
- •The article says batteries can include not only dependencies but also recipes and templates, such as CI configuration using GitHub Actions.