Link to rustc guide

[mark-i-m]

As proposed in rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide#239

[rust-highfive]

r? @GuillaumeGomez

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[mark-i-m]

cc @gnzlbg

[gnzlbg]

@mark-i-m Thanks!

I would just call this the "Rust Compiler Guide" (at least in the title), we want to advertise this for people that might be interested in contributing, but not be familiar with rust, and they might not make the jump that rustc stands for "rust compiler".

Also, the Rust Compiler Guide explains, for example, how to build Rust from source, run the tests, install it in a location that can be picked by rustup, etc. This is not the focus of the guide, but this is very useful information for people that want to build Rust from source for whatever reason, e.g., because rustup does not support their platform, because they are packaging Rust for a linux distribution, etc.

It might well be that this group of people deserves their own guide (How to Build, Test, and Package Rust? :D), but in the meantime the Rust Compiler Guide is all we got, and I think it is worth it to emphasize that it also covers these things (it already mentions them, but it might be worth it to address these more directly somehow).

[mark-i-m]

I'm honestly a bit torn about the naming. There is also a "rustc book" linked in the same page. It is a user guide of how to use the compiler.

[gnzlbg]

Yeah, that's definitely confusing. Maybe "Rust Compiler User Guide" vs "Rust Compiler Developer Guide" ?

[steveklabnik]

This isn't ready to go yet; the plan is to uplift that repo as a submodule in this one, and then do this.

We also discussed the naming at the time. #49707

[gnzlbg]

@steveklabnik is there an open issue tracking that ? Adding the rustc book as a submodule is pretty straightforward, is there anything blocking this?

[mark-i-m]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

Do we need to wait for it to become a submodule first?

[steveklabnik]

@steveklabnik is there an open issue tracking that ? Adding the rustc book as a submodule is pretty straightforward, is there anything blocking this?

There is no issue; the only think blocking it is @nikomatsakis saying that it's ready to go.

Do we need to wait for it to become a submodule first?

Yes.

[gnzlbg]

@nikomatsakis what do you think ? Is the rustc guide "good enough" to be linked in the docs website ? It's a bit hard to discover right now, and it contains information that's useful for non-rustc developers like how to build the Rust toolchain from source and test it etc.

[mark-i-m]

We now have a submodule :)

[Dylan-DPC-zz]

ping from triage @nikomatsakis@steveklabnik any updates on this?

[steveklabnik]

r=me if @nikomatsakis agrees

thank you! sorry for the delay.

[dwijnand]

(ah, the if let of r=me's :P)

[mark-i-m]

Ping @nikomatsakis ?

[nikomatsakis]

@bors r+

[bors]

📌 Commit 980cc6d has been approved by nikomatsakis

[bors]

⌛ Testing commit 980cc6d with merge bf6bb14...

[bors]

☀️ Test successful - status-appveyor, status-travis
Approved by: nikomatsakis
Pushing bf6bb14 to master...