Five Years of Trying to Add Recursion to lychee

Recursion has been lychee’s longest-standing open issue. It’s been sitting there, unresolved, for over five years now. If you haven’t come across it before, lychee is a fast, async link checker written in Rust (BTW). I started it in 2020 because I got bored at home. By now, around 40k GitHub repositories depend on it. You point it at your website, your docs, your README, your Markdown files. Google, AWS, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and many others use it to check links in their documentation. I gave talks and podcasts about it, in case you’d like to learn more. lychee goes weeeee… lychee got funded by NLnet through their NGI Zero program for open, trustworthy infrastructure. That funding allowed us to spend serious, focused time on the project instead of coding late at night.1 The funding is now coming to an end, which feels like the right moment to write this post. And the most honest thing I can say is this: the single most requested feature, recursion, still isn’t shipped. :,( But there…