... as long as they're experienced at writing Rust. As a Rust newbie it took me a long time to figure out simple things like "where is foo implemented", due to the twisty maze of crates and uses directives.

I totally get why this code is written in Rust, but it would have made my life much easier if it were written in C. ;-)

Out of curiosity, what development setup do you use?

I imagine that with vanilla EMacs or vanilla Vim you’d have to do quite a bit of spelunking to answer that sort of question.

With a full-blown IDE like for example JetBrains CLion with Rust plug-in installed, it is most of the time a matter of right-click -> go to definition / go to type declaration. (Although heavy use of Rust macros can in some cases confuse the system and make it unable to resolve definitions/declarations.)

And with JetBrains CLion you still have Vim keybindings available as a plug-in.

I switched from Vim to CLion + plug-ins years ago and haven’t looked back since. (Vanilla Vim is still on my servers though so that when I ssh in and want to edit some config files or whatever I can do so in the terminal.)

Whereas in FreeBSD I just grep for ^foo and the one and only line returned is where foo is implemented -- because if there's different versions of foo, they have different names.

Namespaces sound good in principle but they impose a mental load of "developers need to know what namespace they're currently in" -- which is fine for the original developer but much harder for someone jumping into the code for the first time.

Eg, (me picking a random crate on crates.io): https://docs.rs/syn/2.0.29/syn/ or the standard library: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/index.html

It's all generated by the same system from comments in the source. You can generate the same thing for your code.

I do think it's a deliberate tradeoff, having e.g. .push() do something useful for quite a few similar (Vec-like) data structures means you can often refactor Rust code to a similar data structure by changing one line... but it certainly doesn't make things as grep-friendly as C.