bstr VS docs.rs

Libraries for a lot of this stuff exist (albeit in many cases not very mature yet):

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text does text layout (which Taffy explicitly considers out of scope)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit does accessibility

- https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser does value-agnostic CSS parsing (it will parse the general syntax but leaves value parsing up to the user, meaning you can easily add support for whatever properties you what). Libraries like https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss implement parsing for the standard css properties.

- There are crates like https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr and https://docs.rs/wtf8/latest/wtf8/ for working with non-unicode text

We are planning to add a C API to Taffy, but tbh I feel like C is not very good for this kind of modularised approach. You really want to be able to expose complex APIs with enforced type safety and this isn't possible with C.

As the author of bstr and also the regex implementation that bstr uses to implement word breaking, it is linear time.

NSFL: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/blob/86947727666d7b21c97e...

OsStr uses WTF-8 on Windows, and just represents the raw underlying bytes on Unix.

Byte strings can be WTF-8. They can be anything. The problem is that there is no real way to (easily) get the underlying WTF-8 bytes of an OsStr on Windows. So there's no free conversion to and from byte strings.

I wrote more about this in the bstr docs (and don't miss the link to os_str_bytes): https://docs.rs/bstr/latest/bstr/#file-paths-and-os-strings

I'd be happy to answer more questions if you have them. :-) https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/discussions

Check out bstr, which does this exact thing for its BString and BStr types.

Currently slated for next Monday: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/issues/40

This is just an FYI. I don't mean to say much to your overall point, although, as someone else who has spent a lot of time doing Unicode-y things, I do tend to agree with you. I had a very similar discussion a bit ago.[1]

Putting that aside, at least with respect to grapheme segmentation, it might be a little simpler than you think. But maybe only a little. The unicode-segmentation crate also does word segmentation, which is quite a bit more complicated than grapheme segmentation. For example, you can write a regex to parse graphemes without too much fuss[2]. (Compare that with the word segmentation regex, much to my chagrin.[3]) Once you build the regex, actually using it is basically as simple as running the regex.[4]

Sadly, not all regex engines will be able to parse that regex due to its use of somewhat obscure Unicode properties. But the Rust regex crate can. :-)

And of course, this somewhat shifts code size to heap size. So there's that too. But bottom line is, if you have a nice regex engine available to you, you can whip up a grapheme segmenter pretty quickly. And some regex engines even have grapheme segmentation built in via \X.

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/aho-corasick/issues/72

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/blob/e38e7a7ca986f9499b30...

[3]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/blob/e38e7a7ca986f9499b30...

[4]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/blob/e38e7a7ca986f9499b30...

This is a great idea. I realize the find implementation is not ideal and have considered bringing in an optional dependency to improve performance. I remembered bstr using two-way search, so I was wondering if depending on the full crate for searching would be worthwhile, but I see that changed. Thanks for the tip!

Fun little nit-pick that does not detract from your overall point: you can actually count graphemes with a regex and that's exactly what bstr does. :-)

Working in combination with CodeWhisperer in your IDE, you can send whole code sections to Amazon Q and ask for an explanation of what the selected code does. To show how this works, we open up the file.rs file cloned from this GitHub repository. This is part of an open source project to host documentation of crates for the Rust Programming Language, which is a language we are not familiar with.

Looks like a great initiative – I wish there was a reliable TS/JS equivalent of https://docs.rs (even considering rustdoc's deficiencies[1]).

I went through this exercise recently and so far my experience with trying to produce documentation from a somewhat convoluted TS codebase[2] has been disappointing. I would claim it's a consequence of the library's public (user-facing) API substantially differing from how the actual implementation is structured.

Typedoc produces bad results for that codebase so sphinx-js, which I wanted to use, doesn't have much to work with. I ultimately documented things by hand, for now, the way the API is meant to be used by the user.

Compare:

https://ts-results-es.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/api...

vs

https://tsdocs.dev/docs/ts-results-es/4.1.0-alpha.1/index.ht...

Rust Search Extension adds a section on docs.rs menubar which lists the features of a crate in a nice and easy to access format.

📝 Note: At the time of writing this post, I couldn't really locate the init function docs.rs documentation. It didn't seem easily accessible through any of the current HAL implementation documentation. Nevertheless, I reached the signature of the function through the source here.

Rust Crates are a Game-Changer 🎮:The ease of releasing a crate with `cargo publish` and the convenience of rolling out new versions amazed me. The auto-generated docs on Docs.rs. is an amazing tool, especially with docstring formatting. Doc tests serve as a two-fold tool for documenting the code and ensuring it's up-to-date.

I've found I manually type out certain subsets of URLs where possible[0], maybe that's subconsciously associated with my impression that Google Search results have gotten worse and worse over the years.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ and https://docs.rs/ come to mind.

docs.rs also downloads you crate automatically to generate docs and I would guess lib.rs does something similar

There are also a few key sites you'll want to keep in your back pocket at all times: - The Standard Library Documentation has complete documentation for every std library function in Rust - crates.io is a repository for all third-party packages, and docs.rs has human-readable documentation for the overwhelming majority of them - The Rust Cookbook has some code examples for common tasks you may need to perform - Make sure you are using clippy, which is available through Rustup and can be run with cargo clippy as a replacement to cargo check, it adds additional lints for your Rust code and is very helpful for teaching many of the best practices

OTOH, source-code-generated-docs normalize how code docs are, like the rust docs.rs paradigm, so it sort of forces or encourages package creators/maintainers to write docs.