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0 pointslhorie6y ago0 comments

Yeah, I always check that. The part that says "There is no stdlib documentation yet, but it is planned for the next release" links to a 2015 github issue. That's why I was wondering if it's still a priority or if there were still high level concerns about stability/curation/etc preventing docs from being written.

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AndyKelley6y ago

It's an unwillingness to implement documentation generation twice. Why do it in the c++ compiler when the goal is to become self-hosted?

I think there's a good answer to this which is, "because people really, really need documentation." So I am kicking around ideas of how this can be done without too much duplicate effort.

lhorieOP6y ago

I see. Do you think there would be value in having someone just manually writing some interim docs (perhaps as a wiki) until the time when it can be properly generated?

This may seem like a weird place to draw experience from, but in my early days of programming, I've found the PHP docs extremely helpful largely thanks to community comments sections giving examples of how to do various things. Just some food for thought.

AndyKelley6y ago

I think that would be problematic because the standard library is still very unstable. You can see from the release notes just how much changed from 0.4.0. A wiki page would be outdated right away.

One of the tenets of my development process with Zig is "avoid local maximums". A wiki for std lib documentation is not the long term solution to the problem, and so I won't be investing any time into it. All my time is invested in the long term solution.

jeremyjh6y ago

Couldn’t you say this about every single feature implemented in the C++ compiler?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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AndyKelley6y ago

It's an unwillingness to implement documentation generation twice. Why do it in the c++ compiler when the goal is to become self-hosted?

I think there's a good answer to this which is, "because people really, really need documentation." So I am kicking around ideas of how this can be done without too much duplicate effort.

lhorieOP6y ago

I see. Do you think there would be value in having someone just manually writing some interim docs (perhaps as a wiki) until the time when it can be properly generated?

AndyKelley6y ago

I think that would be problematic because the standard library is still very unstable. You can see from the release notes just how much changed from 0.4.0. A wiki page would be outdated right away.

jeremyjh6y ago

Couldn’t you say this about every single feature implemented in the C++ compiler?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse