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Rust 2020: what about feedbacks?

The Rust teams made a call for people to write blog posts about Rust 2020, so here's mine!

I've been working on the Rust compiler for years. It got stabilized, then matured through the years. From my point of view, it now has most of the features I wanted. So what would I want for Rust 2020 and what's coming after?

To sum it up: feedbacks. It might sound little but feedbacks are one of the most important things for a project to be able to improve itself. In my case, I've been maintaining rustdoc for years but lately, I've found the UI more and more *heavy*, hard to navigate, less intuitive. Which is funny since I've followed its evolution and I am even the one who made most of these changes.

This leads us to my point: we're getting very few feedbacks, so when we get one, we're making a big thing out of it (which is a good thing I think) and sometimes without taking enough steps back (which isn't a good thing). If we had more feedbacks, we could ponderate all them, sort out what most people want or don't want and be able to know exactly what we're going to do.

The lack of feedbacks is (from my point of view) the current great issue of the rustdoc tool and of the Rust documentation more generally and is very problematic.

Now I wonder: how could we make people want to give feedbacks and how could we make it easy for them to give them. I personnally don't know. My current solution is as simple as this: meeting people directly and speaking with them (through meetups and conferences mostly). It doesn't allow to have a great set of perspectives but at least I get some and a lot of them are totally new to me (which is amazing!).

I had a few ideas on how to improve the situation like: maybe having the Rust community taking a biggest part in the communication between the Rust community and its contributors? No clue.

Well anyway, it was my big thought on what I'd like to have for Rust in 2020: feedbacks. Thanks for reading!

Posted on the 01/11/2019 at 21:30 by @GuillaumeGomez

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