Rust: Docs
Unlike many other languages, Rust is hard to grasp. Not because it has some new novel ideas but because it is genuinely a different language compared to the well known bunch. In my experience trying to master it (I am still learning my way through it), it feels like there are so many disconnected concepts like traits/borrow checker/enums/iterators/unsafe etc, which are easy to understand in isolation but hard to make use of in large scale applications. Not because there is something wrong with them but because it requires a different mental model if you are coming from other systems programming languages.
Make no mistake, Rust has some of the best content available to learn from in articles/books/videos etc after reading the usual text books. I have been programming in Rust for a couple of years now. But still I don’t feel comfortable using the language to its fullest potential. This could be partly because, like I said before, I am studying its features in isolation. So in this regard, I want to lay out the foundation for myself by practicing Rust everyday by actually writing Rust code. For this to work, I would like to start with the Rust standard library documentation.
One of the problems I encounter when trying to read the documentation is the sheer number of nightly or experimental APIs that get in your way when you are just getting started. For my use case, I want to just begin with what works with the stable compiler; I don’t want to be bombarded with nightly APIs. Generally Rust’s documentation is amazing in terms of UI and navigation. But strangely it does not have an option to hide all these nightly APIs, so that I can focus only on a much smaller subset of stable APIs.
Luckily I was able to code a Chrome extension that can be used to filter out
these nightly APIs. It is working for my use case and I am in the process of
publishing it to the Chrome Web Store so others can benefit.
https://github.com/vineelkovvuri/rust_docs_extension
Now that we have a better way to navigate Rust docs, I am thinking of beginning with the first module and working my way through each and every API on a daily basis. The goal is not just getting familiar with the API but to really understand to some extent how it is implemented from the first principles of the language. I hope this will give me not only the language features but also how they will be used. Hopefully after a couple of months I will expand this to reviewing and understanding real world projects.
Feel free to check out the above Chrome extension if you are a Rustacean