Is it just me, or does this seem a surprisingly bad teaching aid? I mean, it's correct and concise, but it almost distracts from the things that actually matter. I feel if I was learning Rust again this would've been almost useless, if not actually demotivating (because of how much complexity it shoves in your face all at once).

It reminds me of one of the ways of visually laying out elementary particles according to the Standard Model. And now I wonder how much that representation is also actually detrimental to its use as a teaching aid.

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dathinab 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

yes

the main issue here is that it's basically a list of thing which are "lang_item"s, i.e. have a `#[lang = ...]` attribute or are build in `&/&mut/str/[T]` etc. (but then for some reasons lists combinations of them!?). But `#[lang]` is mainly there to map types to some compiler special casing which might be as trivial as a optimization hint...

and the thing with that is it's

- not useful for teaching *at all* as it's not representing the semantic/logical building blogs, or what "core" means in rust terms or what you have to learn when learning the language or anything. _It pretty much only is relevant if you write the compiler or the standard library for rust_.

- isn't really that useful for know what the "core" of rust is (as many of this items only have a lang tag to make sure some "special case" optimizations, compiler messages, etc. map correctly, and at least in the past you also didn't really have to have all lang items to use rust in a _very_ cut down way)

- conflicts with the term of lib-core (which is a very cut down version of lib-std for embedding use-cases where you e.g. might not have alloc, but you can even write rust without lib-core)

E.g. `Termination` isn't a "core" rust feature, it's a nice customization hook which main exist so that you can have all of `!, (), ExitCode, Result<T,E>` as return types of main, which is mostly irrelevant outside of some QoL edge cases. In general you don't need to know about it and in 99% of cases you shouldn't implement it either.

E.g. Deref,DerefMut, Index, IndexMut, the various Range types, the various operator aren't really special in any way except "hey they have first class syntax" and thats it, the #[lang] tag just tell the compiler "if you find += map it to AddAsing::add_assign".

E.g. the lang tag on `Ordering` is basically a optimization hint AFIK.

etc. etc.

there really is little use for the overview outside of a curiosity and calling it the "core elements" of rust is really just very very misleading

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MeetingsBrowser 3 days ago | parent [-]

> not useful for teaching at all ... _It pretty much only is relevant if you write the compiler or the standard library for rust_.

This seems a little hyperbolic.

> isn't really that useful for know what the "core" of rust is

In the same way it isn't useful for python developers to know what the stack and heap are, maybe.

> conflicts with the term of lib-core

I don't know what group of people might see this and get it confused with lib-core. Most people looking at this will never encounter lib-core directly, the rest are unlikely to look at this and think it has anything to do with lib-core.

> Deref,DerefMut, Index, IndexMut, the various Range types, the various operator aren't really special in any way except "hey they have first class syntax"

first class syntax makes them pretty special IMHO

> there really is little use for the overview outside of a curiosity

I think its a great way to get a high level view of the Types/Traits provided by Rust.

	▲	dathinab 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		But what the author really mixes up is that lang item is in now way the same as "a core part of rust". lang item is only a way to tag things to be special known to the compiler, which sometimes is related to implementation details of the compiler which have little to do with the language design which also means the following statement > The purpose is to demystify what can be built purely in library code. is not fully right. E.g. at least all of Ordering, Option, Result, Clone can be build just fine in library, the lang item is mainly there for optimization hints (and in case of Option FFI layout reasons), but it's an implementation detail which doesn't really needs them to be lang items it was just more convenient to do so when implementing the compiler. A compiler could just give similar properties to anything which "looks like" them. There are subtle fiddly reasons why you maybe don't want to do that for now but technically an implementation detail anyway. And lot of the things which technically can be implemented in a library (e.g. Display) practically kinda can't, as this would cause major interoperability issues. Oh also some special macros you can't implement in a library are missing, but that just seems like a minor oversight of the otherwise quite complete list. But most importantly this is not the conceptual core of the language (but a overlap with it) which would include stuff which has no need to be lang tagged but is a fundamental core design aspect of rust (e.g. Waker for async rust). For a technical aspect of what needs special handling Ordering, Result and some other parts do not, it's just conveniently makes certain things mostly related to optimizations easier to implement. From a high level POV especially in context of teaching rust it contains too many low level parts for niche extension functionality (e.g. panic stuff, termination trait) or too advanced to belong in a high level overview IMHO. And misses a lot of things you would include in a teaching the core of rust for people which learn rust overview. I mean without question the author put a lot of work into it and it's not useless, but IMHO badly named as a listing of lang items just isn't exactly core of rust language design, or core of how you use it. It it an important listing for changing the rust compiler or writing your own lib-core, tho. But that means the the thing its effectively most useful for is an advanced topic, so I wouldn't use it for teaching rust. Too many parts which are core of teaching rust missing (e.g. Debug) while exposing students to too many advanced topics in a way where they look as relevant as relevant parts.

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boxed 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It reminds me of one of the ways of visually laying out elementary particles according to the Standard Model. And now I wonder how much that representation is also actually detrimental to its use as a teaching aid.

The Periodic Table does seem like the inspiration. The crucial difference being that the Periodic Table has that shape for a reason. Take the first column of this page for example: u8, i8, bool. Ok, probably 8 bits big so good so far, but then that SAME ROW also has fn(T...) -> U, const T, mut T. Only two of which are related in any way with eachother, let alone the 8 bits column which is 100% not the same thing.

Contrast to the Periodic Table where the first row has H and He which both only use the base electron shell. H is to the left because it has (when neutral) 1/2 electrons in it's shell and He to the right because it has 2/2. Then going down from He are all the nobel gases which all have full electron shells.

Going down on the right most side of this page has just a bunch of random stuff.

Anyway, the reason people try to draw things like the Periodic Table is because it's super good, but the people who do it think it's good marketing, not based on physics/chemistry, missing the entire point.

	▲	q3k 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Right, I also have some chemistry knowledge, so maybe that's why this felt off (form over function?) to me. There's a reason labs continue to have the modern periodic table on their wall even though they have Wikipedia in their pockets, and it's not just because they get freebies from lab equipment vendors :).