Rust crate
A Rust crate is the unit a piece of Rust software is delivered and named in: one library, under one name, at one version.
In more detail
A project keeps a short file listing the crates it wants and the version of each. The build tool reads that list, fetches them, works out what they themselves want, and compiles the lot together into a single program.
Because everything is compiled together, what comes out is one file with nothing to install beside it. The price is that the build takes the time it takes; the gain is a program that carries its own dependencies inside.
What it does on a real document
The engine is a crate, and the Rust side of it is used that way: the version you were given goes in the list, and the drawing code ends up inside your own program.
Everything the engine needs to draw travels with it, so a program built on it reaches nothing over the network while it works.
Where it comes from, and why
The word was chosen for the image: a crate is what a delivery arrives in. It has named the unit since the language's early years, and the shared store it is fetched from opened in 2014.
A crate carries a version written as three numbers, and a project says which of them it will accept. That is what lets a library be improved without breaking the programs already built on it.
See it on a finished document
The rules behind this word, and the texts they are read from
Glossary
- PDF library
- A piece of software your own programs use to write PDF documents. It has no window and no buttons: your program tells it what to draw, and it hands the finished file back. This site also calls it the engine, which is the same thing under another name. The server is a second program that holds the engine and answers whoever asks it for a document over the network, and the rendering service is that server running on our machines rather than on yours.