Enhancing RUSTDOC to Allow Search by Types

Mihnea DOBRESCU-BALAUR, Lorina NEGREANU
University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest,
313, Splaiul Independentei, Bucharest, 060042, Romania
mihnea@linux.com; lorina.negreanu@cs.pub.ro

Abstract: Programming languages have benefited from increased attention lately. With corporations like Google, Facebook and Mozilla investing in language design, there is a lot of activity in the mainstream languages domain. State of the art features like advanced type systems that were only available to more research-centered languages such as Haskell, are now making their way into the mainstream through languages like Rust. Rust is an up-and-coming system programming language that aims to fill the same role as C and C++, but in a much safer way. To achieve this, it brings a rich type system, alongside a pragmatic implementation of region based memory management, a feature that allows safe memory handling without the need of a garbage collector. Aiming for the mainstream, Rust comes with tooling to aid developers in their work. One such tool is Rustdoc, a program that automatically generates documentation based on type information and programmer comments. We aim to enhance Rustdoc to provide more advanced search support through features that are impossible to implement for dynamic languages, and even static languages with less advanced type systems, like C and Go.

Keywords: Documentation generators, search, type system, Rust.

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CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Mihnea DOBRESCU-BALAUR, Lorina NEGREANU, Enhancing RUSTDOC to Allow Search by Types, Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 24 (2), pp. 221-228, 2015. https://doi.org/10.24846/v24i2y201510