docs.rs VS too-many-lists

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.

You seem to have a preset opinion, and I'm not sure you are interested in re-evaluating it. So this is not written to change your mind.

I've developed production code in C, C++, Rust, and several other languages. And while like pretty much everything, there are situations where it's not a good fit, I find that the solutions tend to be the most robust and require the least post release debugging in Rust. That's my personal experience. It's not hard data. And yes occasionally it's annoying to please the compiler, and if there were no trait constraints or borrow rules, those instances would be easier. But way more often in my experience the compiler complained because my initial solution had problems I didn't realize before. So for me, these situations have been about going from building it the way I wanted to -> compiler tells me I didn't consider an edge case -> changing the implementation and or design to account for that edge case. Also using one example, where is Rust is notoriously hard and or un-ergonomic to use, and dismissing the entire language seems premature to me. For those that insist on learning Rust by implementing a linked list there is https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/.

Advent of Code was okay until I encounterd a problem that required a graph, tree or linked list to solve, where I hit a wall. Most coding exercises are similar--those requiring arrays and hashmaps and sets are okay, but complex data structures are a PITA. (There is an online course dedicated to linked lists in Rust but I couldn't grok it either). IMO you should simply skip problems that you can't solve with your current knowledge level and move on.

I feel obligated to point to the original cannon literature: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

I started learning Rust and like how the compiler is fussy about things. My plan was to implement the data structures I knew, but I got stuck at the singly linked list's remove() method. I've read the book as well, but I have no clue how to simplify this further:

My impression from the article is that Zig provides several different hashtables and not all of them are broken in this way.

This reminds me of Aria's comment in her Rust tutorial https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ about failing to kill LinkedList. One philosophy (and the one Rust chose) for a stdlib is that this is only where things should live when they're so commonly needed that essentially everybody needs them either directly or to talk about. So, HashTable is needed by so much otherwise unrelated software that qualifies, BloomFilter, while it's real useful for some people, not so much. Aria cleaned out Rust's set of standard library containers before Rust 1.0, trying to keep only those most people would need. LinkedList isn't a good general purpose data structure, but, it was too popular and Aria was not able to remove it.

Having multiple hash tables feels like a win (they're optimized for different purposes) but may cost too much in terms of the necessary testing to ensure they all hit the quality you want.

> Cyclic references can be dealt with runtime safety checks too - like Rc and Weak.

Indeed. Starting out with code sprinkled with Rc, Weak, RefCell, etc is perfectly fine and performance will probably not be worse than in any other safe languages. And if you do this, Rust is pretty close to those languages in ease of use for what are otherwise complex topics in Rust.

A good reference for different approaches is Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

Second, once you've finished something introductory like The Book, read Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists. It really helped me to understand what ownership and borrowing actually mean in practical terms. If you don't mind paying for learning materials, a lot of people recommend Programming Rust, Second Edition by Blandy, Orendorff, and Tindall as either a complement, follow-up, or alternative to The Book.

Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists which highlights a lot of the differences with how you need to structure your code in Rust compared to other languages.