[Rust Syllabus] Overview + Tracking

Exercism
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@ellnix GitHub - google/comprehensive-rust: This is the Rust course used by the Android team at Google. It provides you the material to quickly teach Rust. could be worth looking into as well. It is pretty famous and used in the Google Android team e.g.

1 Like
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Hi,

i would really like to help rust get a syllabus and contribute back to exercism. It would also help me to get better in rust i guess.

So firsst i would like to sum up this thread:

  • Current syllabus should be dumped (backed up)
  • A syllabus from another track should be copied into Rust
  • This syllabus should be “rustified”

Am i right? Assuming i am right i would suggest the following:

  • Find a suited syllabus.
  • Back Up the old syllabus
  • Copy syllabus over
  • Create some documentation what has to be done and how it has to be done
  • Wait till we have the fundamental concepts
  • Beta test
  • Polysh
  • Publish
  • Include rust specific topics

This would split up the process in handle able chunks.

23

We had a similar situation with the recently-released Julia syllabus. There were legacy exercises that we kept tripping over for months, and it drove us crazy (or crazier).

I’ll just say: be careful if you want to delete stuff.

  • The links between the Exercism website and the GH repo are complex, somewhat brittle, and few people except @iHiD understand them.
  • Once Exercism has seen a UUID, it never forgets. Deleting things can cause Bad Things to happen, in a way that’s hard to predict.
  • Old exercises should be marked as "status": "deprecated" to hide them from the website.
  • Changing the slug is allowed, but also change the directory name to match. The Julia maintainers ended up adding an old- prefix to things we didn’t want, but there are many alternatives.
  • bin/configlet lint is your friend. It catches many problems before you create a bad PR.

Good luck! A learning syllabus is a valuable thing, and Exercism needs more of them.

24

I should also say: prerequisites are complicated, language-dependent, and a cause of much angst. I confidently predict that the syllabus you eventually release will look nothing like your initial sketch.

Best advice is, don’t sweat it at this stage. Once you have the building clocks (concept-exercise pairs) in hand, it will become a lot clearer what depends on what, and how to sequence them.

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Thank you very much for your contribution.

Based on this input we should “depricate” the old syllabus exercises. Maybe moving them to be normal exercises works?

26

Normally, this is strongly discouraged. Exercism management try to keep a strict separation between Concept Exercises and Practice Exercises.

Maybe you could argue a special case if the exercises were too practice-like to fit in a syllabus? You would need to ask @iHiD for permission, and he’s really busy at the moment (part 2 of the Bootcamp starts tomorrow).

Several of these legacy exercises went live to students, temporarily, so they have lots of old community solutions attached. That might be an extra complication if you repurpose them?