snapbox VS docs.rs

If needed, here is an example of per-word diffing and highlighting of trailing newline differences.

I see. I would try writing the same name as in your Cargo.toml. For example, if yours was toml [package] name = "caesor_cipher" I would try bin.name = "caesor_cipher" It seems that trycmd might ignore a test if the bin.name field is incorrect: https://github.com/assert-rs/trycmd/issues/105

I find rustdoc lacking for clap. rustdoc does a good job with API reference documentation and is improving in its handling of examples but derive reference and tutorial documentation are a weak point.

For examples, its improving with the example scraping work (e.g. https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/struct.ArgMatches.html#meth...) but testing of example is still lacking. I've written trycmd to help (https://github.com/assert-rs/trycmd).

For derive reference and tutorial documentation, your choices are

- A very long, hard to navigate top-level documentation, see https://docs.rs/structopt/latest/structopt/

- External documentation, see https://serde.rs/

- Dummy modules to store your documentation (I've seen this used but can't remember one off the top of my head)

For clap, my documentation examples are best served as programs and we've had a problem with these being broken. The Rust CLI book has a decent strategy for this by pulling in code from external files (https://rust-cli.github.io/book/index.html). I was tempted to do that for clap where example code and output (all verified via trycmd) are pulled into an mdbook site but I've stopped short and just have a README that links out to everything (https://github.com/clap-rs/clap/blob/master/examples/tutoria...). Its not great.

Another problem we found in clap was it was easy for our examples to build but harder to make sure they worked. This is why I wrote trycmd (example "tests").

Would love feedback on on some of the known questions or whatever else is on your mind!

The design is inspired by trybuild with thought given to how mdBook books could pull in content so you can verify a code sample, the command for running it, and the output. In considering how to keep clap's website up-to-date, I had this idea and threw it together to see how well it works. Overall, seems good with room for improvement. I'll have to give this a try on a real world program soon.

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.