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Figuring out how to get all the crate source code extracted was the first step, yes. But when after that, the object oriented nature meant that there were often many different foo functions, so I had to dig through the code to figure out what type of object I was dealing with and which type each of the different foo implementations dealt with.

Whereas in FreeBSD I just grep for ^foo and the one and only line returned is where foo is implemented -- because if there's different versions of foo, they have different names.

Namespaces sound good in principle but they impose a mental load of "developers need to know what namespace they're currently in" -- which is fine for the original developer but much harder for someone jumping into the code for the first time.




If you go to the web site for the crate (or the standard library), and find the doco for the module / function / trait / ..., you find an handy "source" button. It will take you straight to the definition.

Eg, (me picking a random crate on crates.io): https://docs.rs/syn/2.0.29/syn/ or the standard library: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/index.html

It's all generated by the same system from comments in the source. You can generate the same thing for your code.


Sure, but that doesn't help me when I want to go into that code and add extras debugging code so I can figure out where things are going wrong.


Yes! After a bit of playing around, I can follow Rust reasonably well... but only with an IDE, which I've never used for C or even really for the bits of Java I wrote. I understand that many more experienced Rust developers are similarly IDE-reliant.

I do think it's a deliberate tradeoff, having e.g. .push() do something useful for quite a few similar (Vec-like) data structures means you can often refactor Rust code to a similar data structure by changing one line... but it certainly doesn't make things as grep-friendly as C.




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