2024’s Top 30 High-Performance Open-source Apps and Projects Built with Rust
Rust is a top choice for developers building high-performance, reliable, and secure applications. Its memory safety features, combined with speed, make it ideal for systems programming and web development.
![](https://medevel.com/content/images/2024/08/Intricately-Designed-Cork-and-Metal-Chair.jpg)
In 2024, Rust continues to power some of the most efficient and innovative applications, solidifying its place in high-performance development.
1. Yazi Terminal File Manager
Yazi (means "duck") is a terminal file manager written in Rust, based on non-blocking async I/O. It aims to provide an efficient, user-friendly, and customizable file management experience.
Features
- 🚀 Full Asynchronous Support: All I/O operations are asynchronous, CPU tasks are spread across multiple threads, making the most of available resources.
- 💪 Powerful Async Task Scheduling and Management: Provides real-time progress updates, task cancellation, and internal task priority assignment.
- 🖼️ Built-in Support for Multiple Image Protocols: Also integrated with Überzug++ and Chafa, covering almost all terminals.
- 🌟 Built-in Code Highlighting and Image Decoding: Combined with the pre-loading mechanism, greatly accelerates image and normal file loading.
- 🔌 Concurrent Plugin System: UI plugins (rewriting most of the UI), functional plugins, custom previewer/preloader/fetcher; Just some pieces of Lua.
- 📡 Data Distribution Service: Built on a client-server architecture (no additional server process required), integrated with a Lua-based publish-subscribe model, achieving cross-instance communication and state persistence.
- 📦 Package Manager: Install plugins and themes with one command, keeping them up to date, or pin them to a specific version.
- 🧰 Integration with ripgrep, fd, fzf, zoxide
- 💫 Vim-like input/select/which/notify component, auto-completion for cd paths
- 🏷️ Multi-Tab Support, Cross-directory selection, Scrollable Preview (for videos, PDFs, archives, directories, code, etc.)
- 🔄 Bulk Renaming, Visual Mode, File Chooser
- 🎨 Theme System, Mouse Support, Trash Bin, Custom Layouts, CSI u
2. Gleam programming language
Gleam is a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale!
3- Burn (AI - Deep Learning Framework)
Burn is a new comprehensive dynamic Deep Learning Framework built using Rust with extreme flexibility, compute efficiency and portability as its primary goals.
4. Helix (Code Editor)
Helix is an amazing Vim-alike terminal code editor.
5. Rustdesk (Remote Desktop)
Rustdesk is a free and open-source remote desktop application designed for self-hosting, as an alternative to TeamViewer.
6. Stalwart Mail Server
Stalwart Mail Server is an open-source mail server solution with JMAP, IMAP4, POP3, and SMTP support and a wide range of modern features. It is written in Rust and designed to be secure, fast, robust and scalable.
![](https://medevel.com/content/images/2024/08/Screenshot-2024-08-04-at-17.30.13.png)
7. Lapce
Lapce (IPA: /læps/) is written in pure Rust with a UI in Floem. It is designed with Rope Science from the Xi-Editor which makes for lightning-fast computation, and leverages Wgpu for rendering. More information about the features of Lapce can be found on the main website and user documentation can be found on GitBook.
8. Tauri
Tauri is a framework for building tiny, blazingly fast binaries for all major desktop platforms. Developers can integrate any front-end framework that compiles to HTML, JS and CSS for building their user interface. The backend of the application is a rust-sourced binary with an API that the front-end can interact with.
9. gitoxide (Git Alternative)
gitoxide
is an implementation of git
written in Rust for developing future-proof applications which strive for correctness and performance while providing a pleasant and unsurprising developer experience.
gitoxide
provides the gix
and ein
binaries for use on the command-line to allow experimentation with key features like fetch
and clone
, and to validate the usability and control of the API offered by the gix
crate.
10. Yew (Web Framework)
Yew is a modern Rust framework for creating multi-threaded front-end web apps with WebAssembly.
11. egui (GUI Library)
egui (pronounced "e-gooey") is a simple, fast, and highly portable immediate mode GUI library for Rust
12. GreptimeDB (Time0series Database)
GreptimeDB is an open-source unified time-series database for Metrics, Logs, and Events (also Traces in plan). You can gain real-time insights from Edge to Cloud at any scale.
13. RustPython
A Python-3 (CPython >= 3.12.0) Interpreter written in Rust 🐍 😱 🤘.
14. Alacritty
Alacritty is a modern terminal emulator that comes with sensible defaults, but allows for extensive configuration.
By integrating with other applications, rather than reimplementing their functionality, it manages to provide a flexible set of features with high performance.
The supported platforms currently consist of BSD, Linux, macOS and Windows.
15. kftray
kftray is an open-source free cross-platform system tray application for managing multiple kubectl port-forward commands, with support for UDP and proxy connections through k8s clusters.
kftray is a cross-platform system tray app made with Tauri (Rust and TypeScript) for Kubernetes users. It simplifies setting up multiple kubectl port forward configurations through a user-friendly interface. Easily store and manage all configurations from local files or GitHub repositories.
16. tiny - Yet another terminal IRC client
tiny is an IRC client written in Rust.
17. Neon (Serverless Postgres)
Neon is a serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres. It separates storage and compute and substitutes the PostgreSQL storage layer by redistributing data across a cluster of nodes.
18. Furtherance
Furtherance is a free time tracking app, with a native interface on Linux (Gnome), Windows, and macOS. It allows you to track time spent on different activities without worrying about your data being captured and sold.
19. AppFlowy
AppFlowy is an AI collaborative workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data. The best open source alternative to Notion.
20. MeiliSearch
MeiliSearch is a free and open-source lightning-fast search engine that fits effortlessly into your apps, websites, and workflow 🔍.
21. starship
This shell prompt is minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable, offering a highly responsive experience across any shell and operating system.
It's intelligent, displaying relevant information at a glance, and feature-rich, supporting all your favorite tools. The prompt is easy to install, allowing you to start using it in minutes, and you can configure every aspect to suit your preferences.
22- AFFiNE
AFFiNE is an open-source knowledge management platform that combines note-taking, whiteboarding, and task management into one unified workspace. Designed to help users organize their thoughts and ideas seamlessly, AFFiNE offers a fluid, collaborative environment that supports real-time editing and sharing.
Its focus on privacy ensures that all your data remains secure, making it an ideal choice for teams and individuals seeking a versatile tool to manage projects, brainstorm ideas, and keep track of tasks in a structured yet flexible way.
23. Spacedrive
Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file explorer, powered by a virtual distributed filesystem written in Rust.
24- Pake
With Pake you can turn any webpage into a desktop app with Rust with ease.
25. Tokio
Tokio is a free and open-source event-driven, non-blocking I/O platform for writing asynchronous applications with the Rust programming language.
26. Servo
Servo is a prototype web browser engine written in the Rust language. It is currently developed on 64-bit macOS, 64-bit Linux, 64-bit Windows, and Android.
27. InfluxDB
InfluxDB is the leading open source time series database for metrics, events, and real-time analytics.
28. Polars
Polars is a DataFrame interface on top of an OLAP Query Engine implemented in Rust using Apache Arrow Columnar Format as the memory model.
29- Firecracker
Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant container and function-based services that provide serverless operational models.
Firecracker runs workloads in lightweight virtual machines, called microVMs, which combine the security and isolation properties provided by hardware virtualization technology with the speed and flexibility of containers.
30. ClickHouse
ClickHouse® is an open-source column-oriented database management system that allows generating analytical data reports in real-time.