The article details the five-year struggle to implement recursion in lychee, a popular Rust-based link checker used by major tech companies. Despite multiple attempts and funding from NLnet, the feature remains unimplemented due to architectural challenges and the complexity of handling recursive link checking efficiently. The post provides technical insights into why this seemingly simple feature has proven so difficult to add.
Background
lychee is a fast, async link checker written in Rust that's used by major tech companies like Google, AWS, and Microsoft to verify links in their documentation. The project gained significant traction with around 40,000 GitHub repositories depending on it.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Jun 1, 2026 at 02:12 PM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10