Bincode, the go-to crate for compact binary serialization, is now officially unmaintained after its maintainer faced doxxing and harassment.

On a more constructive note, wgpu 28.0 landed with long-awaited Mesh Shader support and async adapter discovery, pushing the graphics stack closer to modern GPU architectures. Meanwhile, Metal-rs has signaled its deprecation, adding another item to the low-level dependency audit list.

In this weeks’s Rust Crates recap:

> Bincode crazy storry

> Metal-rs deprecation warning

> wgpu 28.0 Mesh Shader support

Bincode Goes Dark

The Recap: Bincode, long considered the ecosystem standard for compact binary serialization, is now officially unmaintained following a doxxing and harassment incident against its maintainer.

Unpacked:

The final release isn't an update, it's a tombstone. The crate now contains only a README and a lib.rs with a compiler error, intentionally breaking builds to alert users to the situation.

The maintainer recommends these alternatives:

  • wincode - drop-in bincode-compatible replacement

  • postcard - similar philosophy, different flavor

  • rkyv - zero-copy deserialization, arguably better for many original bincode use cases like intra-program message passing

The incident also exposed several crates.io pain points: no way to mark packages unmaintained, no ownership transfer process for abandoned crates, and no ability to edit metadata without publishing a release. This forces burned-out maintainers to either hand-pick successors or leave the ecosystem to fight over forks.

Bottom line: Another reminder that critical infrastructure often rests on individual volunteers. If you depend on bincode, start evaluating alternatives now.

Metal 0.33.0: Metal 4 Support & Deprecation Warning

The Recap: Version 0.33.0 of metal-rs brings support for the Metal 4 GPU family to Rust developers while officially marking the library as deprecated.

Unpacked:

  • The crate has been explicitly deprecated, signaling a major shift that requires immediate attention from maintainers relying on these low-level Apple bindings. View the project status

  • Support for the Metal 4 GPU family is now available, allowing applications to leverage the latest capabilities of Apple Silicon hardware.

  • New methods set_viewports and set_scissor_rects have been added to give developers finer control over render passes.

  • The update refreshes the dependency tree by bumping glam to 0.30 and rand to 0.9 while removing the home crate. Read the full changelog

Bottom line: This release provides critical access to modern hardware features while serving as a final notice for the library's lifecycle. Developers should use this opportunity to finalize their implementation or begin planning a migration to alternative graphics abstractions.

wgpu & naga 28.0: Mesh Shaders & Async Adapters

The Recap: The release of wgpu and naga 28.0.0 delivers major advancements for Rust graphics programming, introducing Mesh Shaders and modernizing the initialization flow with async APIs.

Unpacked:

  • Developers can now leverage Mesh Shaders on Vulkan, Metal, and DX12 to handle complex geometry processing more efficiently than fixed-function pipelines allow. Support for Mesh Shaders

  • The enumerate_adapters function is now async, enabling applications to discover graphics hardware without blocking the main execution thread. Async enumerate_adapters

  • A new LoadOp::DontCare variant helps optimize memory traffic on tile-based architectures by signaling that attachment contents can be safely discarded.

  • To align terminology with actual hardware behavior, "push constants" have been renamed to "immediates" throughout the API.

  • Several breaking changes improve type safety, such as splitting FilterMode into a separate MipmapFilterMode for sampler descriptors and updating push_error_scope to return a scope guard.

Bottom line: These updates empower developers to utilize modern GPU capabilities while optimizing application startup performance on diverse hardware. Teams upgrading should verify their initialization logic to handle the new asynchronous requirements.

The Shortlist

Cucumber released version 0.22.0, providing a native, dependency-free implementation of the testing framework compatible with Rust 1.88+ environments.

Gherkin updated to version 0.15, offering a pure Rust parser for feature files to facilitate behavior-driven development workflows without unsafe code.