I recently did some minor file name munging in Rust, and was reminded that one of the hard parts about learning a new language is the differences in vocabulary. In UNIX, there are two command line tools, basename and dirname. They take a pathname as an argument and print a modified pathname to stdout, which is really handy for shell scripts. Several other languages copied that naming convention, and so I was really surprised to find that googling for rust dirname didn’t return anything useful1.

I’ve been writing a bunch of rust code lately, and it’s been a pretty great experience! The thing I enjoy most about it is that the documentation looks just so extremely good. Which brings me to my major point of frustration with my rust-writing setup: Writing doc comments in emacs’s otherwise excellent rust-mode is a pain. You always have to insert the doc comment character sequence de la ligne, and writing doctest examples was even worse: You write rust code, inside markdown, in rust comments.