Monthly review: February

What I’ve worked on

February has been quite a non-productive month from the outside. Maybe it’s the winter blues finally catching up to me, but that’s for the next section of thepost.

It indeed doesn’t look like a lot in terms of merged PRs this month. The only merged PR is to the rustc-guide where I’ve added an introductory section to the Name Resolution chapter.

I’ve been learning about name resolution in rustc because I’ve been looking into making some improvements to a rustc diagnostic that is emitted exactly during name resolution. So that instead of this:

12 | let _ = HashNap::new();
   | ^^^^^^^
   | |
   | use of undeclared type or module `HashNap`

You will get an additional suggestion of the most likely alternative:

12 | let _ = HashNap::new();
   | ^^^^^^^
   | |
   | use of undeclared type or module `HashNap`
   | help: a struct with a similar name exists: `HashMap`

This PR has taken most of my time and energy in February. I want to finish it this month and continue with work around name resolution.

Reflections

I did not get further into embedded development as I ran into issues with my tools, which I was hoping to avoid by jumping into embedded development.

Instead of doing more embedded development, I’ve started looking into librustc_resolve. Specifically a PR to improve some diagnostics as mentioned above. This PR has apparently triggered some sort of impostor feeling in me. While working on this PR I noticed two things:

In the beginning I had absolutely no idea what librustc_resolve is about, lowering my confidence in completing this PR
My low confidence in completing the PR also produced feelings of guilt when asking otherwise busy contributors for help

In the future I hope this feeling will go away as I dig further into rustc. Until then, I plan to ‘just’ push through these feelings, keeping my main goal in the back of my head: Making diagnostics and lints better for rust users.