The Rustc Dev Guide Working Group, formed in April 2019, is focused on making the compiler easier to learn by ensuring that rustc-dev-guide and API docs are "complete". It is one of the many efforts by the Rust Compiler team to decrease the barrier of contributing to the compiler. As noted on the WG’s homepage —

This working group aims to accomplish the following:

• Ensure that major components of rustc are covered in rustc-dev-guide
• Ensure that API doc coverage is at least 90%

The Learning Group is making entry to contribute easier by improving the compiler documentation for the new and potential contributors. We all know this bias — the more time we’ve spent in a system, the less likely we are to see the issues that the newcomers might face. Given that, this group organically became an attractive place for beginners, who would benefit from documenting the compiler internals, while learning those parts of it at the same time. This benefits the entire compiler team by giving the documentation a perspective from the new contributors.

The Learning group, in general, is starting to document the “Compiler lecture series”, which are a list of Youtube video lectures given earlier by the more knowledgeable members of the compiler team. There is also the task of improving the documentation structure of rustc-dev-guide. At first, each member used to pick a video lecture by themselves and contribute via a Github pull request to the rustc-dev-guide Github repository. This proved to be a bit difficult for the following reasons —

1. Not all members would get to watch and work on the lectures of their choice.
2. The knowledge would still be fragmented depending on who watched which lecture.
3. Some lectures are more interesting than others and this means that some contributors would miss out on the interesting ones.
4. Certain lectures are more difficult and require input from multiple people.

Hence, at the moment, the group decided to work on one video at a time. This has proven to be beneficial for the entire group, especially with the lecture Representing types in rustc. At the time of this writing, it is still a work-in-progress but the input from everyone allows people to work together while benefiting from the questions that everyone has about the lecture.

The group is still learning about the best possible ways to organize and manage and some compiler team veterans are always there to help out! We are always in need of help from both existing compiler contributors and new folks who want to contribute and learn.

Call for participation

There is no bar to entry in the group. To join the group, you can drop a message in #t-compiler/wg-rustc-dev-guide on Zulip introducing yourself. We would love to hear from you and hope we all together can make the documentation better.

Important resources

• Rustc Dev Guide Working Group
• Rustc Dev Guide Book
• Rustc Dev Guide Repository
• Github Project (Kanban)
• Learning WG Meeting Minutes
• Rust Youtube Videos
• Zulip Stream: #t-compiler/wg-rustc-dev-guide on Zulip