#rusttip — Public Fediverse posts

Did you know that you can add doc aliases to your #Rust items (struct, method etc.), so that they appear in #RustDoc search results, when searching for that alias?🔍

https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustdoc/advanced-features.html#add-aliases-for-an-item-in-documentation-search

You can even add multiple aliases at once, like this:

#[doc(alias("modify", "index"))]
pub fn modified_field_indices(...);

Such a useful feature (that should be used more often)!

⚠️ Note that it will only show in results, when searching for the full alias!

#RustLang #Search #RustTip #Documentation #UX

If you get weird #Rust #Lifetime #error's: have you already tried to just _remove_ the lifetime annotations and see what happens? You'll often get much better error messages this way. :ferris:

If this doesn't work and you still can't figure it out: try to not use references and own your values instead.

#RustLang #RustTip #RustTips #FerrisTipOfTheDay

Did you know that a lot of things in #Rust directly implement the `Ord` trait?

For example `Option<T>` where T: Ord

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/enum.Option.html#impl-Ord-for-Option%3CT%3E

So you can do:

assert_eq(max(Some(0), Some(1)), Some(1))

assert_eq(max(Some(0), None), Some(0))

assert_eq(min(Some(0), None), None)

There are a lot of other things that implement `Ord`:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/cmp/trait.Ord.html#implementors

#RustLang #RustTips #RustTip

Oh wow, did you know that in #Rust you can use Option as an iterator such that your types align, when you want to return a chain of iterators from a function, but also have an else case where the iterator is empty!?

I know, this was a mouthful.😳

Let's look at a playground that shows this:
https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=129eb419d767b71447b408e456773555

This trick is right from the docs on option:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/option/#iterating-over-option

What a cunning trick!🤓

Rust, I ❤️ you!

#RustTip #RustTips #RustLang