src/doc/reference/src/introduction.md

   1 # Introduction
   2
   3 This document is the primary reference for the Rust programming language. It
   4 provides three kinds of material:
   5
   6   - Chapters that informally describe each language construct and their use.
   7   - Chapters that informally describe the memory model, concurrency model,
   8     runtime services, linkage model and debugging facilities.
   9   - Appendix chapters providing rationale and references to languages that
  10     influenced the design.
  11
  12 This document does not serve as an introduction to the language. Background
  13 familiarity with the language is assumed. A separate [book] is available to
  14 help acquire such background familiarity.
  15
  16 This document also does not serve as a reference to the [standard] library
  17 included in the language distribution. Those libraries are documented
  18 separately by extracting documentation attributes from their source code. Many
  19 of the features that one might expect to be language features are library
  20 features in Rust, so what you're looking for may be there, not here.
  21
  22 Finally, this document is not normative. It may include details that are
  23 specific to `rustc` itself, and should not be taken as a specification for
  24 the Rust language. We intend to produce such a document someday, but this
  25 is what we have for now.
  26
  27 You may also be interested in the [grammar].
  28
  29 You can contribute to this document by opening an issue or sending a pull
  30 request to [the Rust Reference repository].
  31
  32 N. B. This document may be incomplete. Documenting everything might take a
  33 while. We have a [big issue] to track documentation for every Rust feature,
  34 so check that out if you can't find something here.
  35
  36 [book]: ../book/index.html
  37 [standard]: ../std/index.html
  38 [grammar]: ../grammar.html
  39 [the Rust Reference repository]: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/reference/
  40 [big issue]: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/reference/issues/9