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Comment by fasterthanlime | Hacker News Reader

Not to worry, we also spend some time messing with strace and GDB. I see it more as "giving a working knowledge of Rust" than a distraction. Some of these crates/tools are lifechangers, I wouldn't want folks to miss out on them.

I'm sorry yodelshady has run into a build error for cargo-edit (was it OpenSSL? screw OpenSSL) but also: the more folks run into these issues and report them, the sooner they're fixed. Also! I think cargo-edit should just be adopted by the default cargo distribution because it's all-around really good.

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I have to agree with the first comment: Speaking as someone who was a tech trainer and writer of course materials, tutorial, etc. for a couple of decades, if ``carge-edit`` is not core to what you're trying to teach, leave it out. Get your own desires (ego) out of the way, and stick to teaching what you need to teach. Leave the distractions/side-tracks/proselytising to a separate lesson. You think of the lesson as "Giving a Working Knowledge of Rust"? Great! Then title it accordingly and don't dress it up in "futures" camouflage -- you're doing your readers/learners a disservice.

Many, many tutorials make this mistake.

> Then title it accordingly and don't dress it up in "futures" camouflage -- you're doing your readers/learners a disservice.

In their defense, the title is "Understanding Rust futures by going way too deep", and I think advice and tangents on best practices modules is easily covered by "going way too deep".

> you're doing your readers/learners a disservice.

Not every tutorial needs to be the same, cater to the same type of person, or try to explain things in the same manner. I think the bigger disservice to readers/learners would be to homogenize tutorials into what you think is best. That might work best for a certain type of person at a certain skill level, but that doesn't mean everyone will be served well by that. And as the comments here illustrate, it's not like there's a dearth of Rust futures tutorials and explanations. There's definitely room for a rambling, informal, irreverent, meandering take (it's the only thing that kept me reading until the end, or even past the first page or two).

This isn't a tutorial, nor a training, nor a course though, this is a cave exploration. Its going down the wrong paths, multiple times on purpose. So pack your bag, get your tools in order, we may not return. I really like this style, the wrong paths/side tracks have so much to teach us (more than the right paths).

As someone who's been a technical writer (albeit for years rather than decades), I think this is often good advice, but not here. As other people have pointed out, this isn't trying to be a Futures 101 or Futures for Total Beginners. The title or opening could maybe be clearer about its scope (although I think "way too deep" at least implies the author isn't covering the topic as directly or succinctly as possible), but I think the digressions are interesting to Amos' target audience and part of his style.

You have mistaken this for a tutorial.

I mean, we could also just let the guy write how he wants to write, since we're reading his stuff for free, and we aren't entitled to anything at all from him.

I enjoyed it, and I had never heard of cargo-edit before, and am really glad I now know about it!

Tracking issue on cargo-edit here: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/5586

I too really, really want this. If only I had the energy to work up some patches...

I only learnt about the logging and tracing crates existed from this blog post and I've already started using them, so thank you!

The Zero to Rust[1] series also has a fairly comprehensive look into these.

[1]: https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/2020-09-27-zero-to-productio...

> we also spend some time messing with strace and GDB

Yes, and if I had learned about these a couple months ago it would have saved me ~8 hours tracking a bug down. So, thank you.

I'd say this is a good explanation, but a bad tutorial[1]. Which is fine, they're different things. But if you want it to be a tutorial it should be focused on just Rust Futures, and the other stuff should be separated out.

[1] https://documentation.divio.com/

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