A "Design FAQ" document

[steveklabnik]

Issue by bstrie
Tuesday Nov 27, 2012 at 20:34 GMT

For earlier discussion, see rust-lang/rust#4047

This issue was labelled with: A-docs, I-wishlist in the Rust repository

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In the vein of the Project FAQ and the Language FAQ.

In addition to being really interesting, this would save a lot of time and divert a lot of potential questions in the long run. Some topics to discuss:

• Why was typestate removed?
• Why are some types nominal instead of structural?
• Why do I have to declare impls in the same crate as a type or trait?
• Why is trait inheritance the only means of inheritance?
• Why doesn't Rust do tail-call optimization?
  (see e.g. rust-dev post.)

Explanations should be technical and include code examples wherever possible.

Some of the questions of this nature overlap with the latter half of the Language FAQ, but not all, e.g. "Can Rust code call C code?" and "What is the difference between a managed pointer and an owned pointer?" do not belong. The document should focus on large-scale design decisions and tradeoffs; think "Why split stacks?" rather than "How do split stacks work?".

If you think of good questions, add them in the comments here. There are probably a lot of ripe areas for explanation, especially with regard to mutability and regions.

[pnkfelix]

I liked having a complete list of the questions on one web page (as I noted in my comment on the original issue)

I suggest we either:

• close this ticket and reopen A "Design FAQ" document rust#4047 , or
• open a shared document somewhere and transcribe all of the comments from A "Design FAQ" document rust#4047 into that shared document.

In the meantime I am planning to continue writing my comments in rust-lang/rust#4047 (even though it is closed) , since for the short term, that is the easiest way to keep all of the proposed questions in one place. (I suggest others do the same until we decide on some other way to resolve this problem.)

[pnkfelix]

quick decision: I will try to import the comments from rust-lang/rust#4047 in the near term.

[steveklabnik]

I could move this over without the `--ignore-comments` flag and it would just move all the comments over?

[steveklabnik]

That didn't work (#891) due to rate limiting.

[Centril]

I believe https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/faq.html satisfies this "Design FAQ" document idea. So I'm closing this as being completed.