PSVM

A self-initiated Rust CLI and library that became official tooling for managing Polkadot SDK dependencies.

Rust
Polkadot SDK
Cargo
Open source

Initiative: Independently created
Adopted: Official SDK README
Ongoing: PSVM + SDK contributions

Challenge

Polkadot SDK projects depend on many crates that move together, making manual version alignment slow and error-prone.

Responsibility

Independently conceived and built the tool on my own initiative, then continued contributing extensively to both PSVM and the wider Polkadot SDK.

Solution

Built a focused tool that reads authoritative release metadata, resolves compatible crate versions, and updates Cargo.toml files consistently.

Outcome

Adopted into Parity's official tooling and featured in the main README of Polkadot SDK, a framework with 2,800+ GitHub stars. Available as a CLI and Rust library.

Engineering decisionsD-01

Release metadata first

PSVM uses the Polkadot SDK release Plan.toml as the source of truth instead of maintaining a second manual compatibility table.

Safe fallback behavior

When a release does not contain Plan.toml, the resolver falls back to Cargo.lock and makes that behavior explicit to the user.

Useful beyond the CLI

The core version-resolution logic is also exposed as a Rust library so other tools can integrate it directly.