Rayon-core represents the "core, stable" APIs of Rayon: join, scope, and so forth, as well as the ability to create custom thread-pools with ThreadPool. Maybe worth mentioning: users are not necessarily intended to directly access rayon-core; all its APIs are mirror in the rayon crate. To that end, the examples in the docs use rayon::join and so forth rather than rayon_core::join. rayon-core aims to never, or almost never, have a breaking change to its API, because each revision of rayon-core also houses the global thread-pool (and hence if you have two simultaneous versions of rayon-core, you have two thread-pools). Please see [Rayon Docs] for details about using Rayon. [Rayon Docs]: https://docs.rs/rayon/ Rayon-core currently requires `rustc 1.13.0` or greater.