And The Rust Programming Language (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book) is on its way to paper publication.
The newly minted Rustonomicon (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/nomicon/) that covers deeper aspects of Rust is hopefully destined for the same.
I appreciate that the vast majority of Rust's D&E happened in the open, so most of it's probably still available, but it's been a long and twisty road since Graydon's initial public post and picking out a coherent narrative from umpteen separate slowly-linkrotting fora would be no small task.
I did a talk at FOSDEM 2015 along these lines, which apparently got lost with a lot of them :/
My background includes OS development (Windows COM), driver development (C for kernel mode driver and C for HW firmware development), web development (C#/ASP.NET and JavaScript - both in browser and Node.js), and most recently HW simulation using C++/SystemC. Mixed bag, I know. What I want to use Rust for is desktop app development. I could go C, but that's a lot of manual labor. I could go C# but I don't like paying cost of the runtime on desktop. I could go C++ but I don't like getting my soul crushed. I tested viability of Node (and Python, actually) for desktop apps but it just didn't fit my needs.
So I want to love Rust. And I kinda do. Initially I didn't like certain things (bits of syntax mostly) but I've learned to love them. The problem is: none of the resources tell me interesting stuff all the way through the system. I feel like knowledge could be laid out with all the details from "this is syntax" to "this is what happens" to "this is what you can/cannot do" to "this is why this happens" to "this is what this means to the compiler" to "this is what happens under the hood/in asm".
I'd also[1] love to have something that roughly maps rust to C and gives me clear explanation of pros/cons of various approaches. It wasn't immediately obvious to me if I can have static methods. Of whether it's important to have self mutable (or not) as a method param. Or how to organize structures now that I have to keep mutability in mind. I know this comes with time but I'd love a kick of sorts. :) Best ideas tend to come from reading existing pieces of code but rarely knows if author is worth mimicking. :S
Either way - I'm invested and I like what I'm seeing. Great work guys!
[1] or these could become one thing, dunno
There's some things like `Option<&T>` which we guarantee but really it's a lot of "man, if the compiler was smart enough...". Even then, a stray annotation can wall LLVM and kill any chances of perf (e.g. if the function is not a candidate for cross-crate inlining).
But I don't think this is the most important thing I want to know. What I want Rust to be is the opinionated low cost, higher level language. "Do things this way, dummy!" is what I need the most (at this point of my familiarity with the language at least).