This is a collaborative effort to build a guide that explains how rustc works. The aim of the guide is to help new contributors get oriented to rustc, as well as to help more experienced folks in figuring out some new part of the compiler that they haven't worked on before.
For more information, see About This Guide.
For documentation on developing the standard library, see
std-dev-guide.
The guide is useful today, but it has a lot of work still to go.
If you'd like to help improve the guide, we'd love to have you! You can find plenty of issues on the issue tracker. Just post a comment on the issue you would like to work on to make sure that we don't accidentally duplicate work. If you think something is missing, please open an issue about it!
See below for instructions on writing new docs.
The guide has a much lower bar for what it takes for a PR to be merged. Check out the forge documentation for our policy.
To build a local static HTML site, install mdbook with:
cargo install mdbook mdbook-linkcheck2 mdbook-mermaid
and execute the following command in the root of the repository:
mdbook serve --open
For a one-off build, you can use mdbook build.
We use mdbook-linkcheck2 to validate URLs included in our documentation.
Link checking is not run by default locally, though it is in CI.
To enable it locally, set the environment variable ENABLE_LINKCHECK=1 like in the
following example.
ENABLE_LINKCHECK=1 mdbook serve
In general, if you don't know how the compiler works, that is not a problem! In that case, what we will do is to schedule a bit of time for you to talk with someone who does know the code, or who wants to pair with you and figure it out. Then you can work on writing up what you learned.
The dev-guide is organized as a normal mdBook:
It has a src/SUMMARY.md table of contents, which links to individual pages under src/.
Configuration lives in book.toml.
Images are in src/img.
The build files are found in the book/html directory.
NOTE: if you do not add a page to SUMMARY.md, it will not be shown!
See the guide itself for instructions on writing new docs.
Various tools are kept under ci/.
Check links with mdbook-linkcheck2 --standalone.
Check semantic line breaks with cargo run --manifest-path ci/sembr/Cargo.toml src.
Triage <!-- date-check --> annotations with cargo run --manifest-path ci/date-check/Cargo.toml ..
You can test those tools with cargo test --manifest-path ci/<tool>/Cargo.toml.
This repository is linked to rust-lang/rust as a josh subtree.
You can use the rustc-josh-sync tool to perform synchronization.
You can find a guide on how to perform the synchronization here.