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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

The benefits realized can be mostly attributed to strong type checking.

I'm a rust dev full time. And I agree with everything here. But I also want people to realize it's not "Just Rust" that does this.

In case anyone gets FOMO.

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Do you know a language other than Rust that has alternative for docs.rs? In JavaScript and Python they never bother to have any documentation or reference, one notable example that gets me frustrated these days is the openai SDK for TypeScript. There is no documentation for it. I have to go look at the source code to figure out what the hell goes on.

These days isn't the solution to this just "ask <insert LLM of choice here>" to read the code and write the documentation"?

Yes, you can have Claude Code go through the code and make an .md file with documentation for all the public APIs. I do that for everything that doesn't provide llms.txt.

If you want to not reliably know anything about the code, sure. But if you want to have useful knowledge, using a stochastically unreliable tool isn't going to cut it.

javadoc.io is similar to (but not as good as) docs.rs for the Java ecosystem. It pulls the JavaDoc out of packages that are published to the Maven Central repository. It doesn't have good discoverability like docs.rs, though, and it's dependent on the publishers actually including the javadoc files.

javadoc.io is similar in the fact that it lists things I guess? It looks worse (objective) but is also depended on a lot less so is just by default going to be a second thought. It’s also not auto-generated like docs.rs like you said.

> In JavaScript and Python they never bother to have any documentation or reference

Please, main Python libraries have much richer docs than almost anything from Rust ecosystem.

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