We deserve helpful tools
summary
Argues that tools should give actionable, tested diagnostics: Rust treats diagnostics as first-class, with ~19,000 UI snapshot tests, ~2,000 open diagnostic bugs historically and 4.7K fixes, plus a diagnostic namespace for libraries to emit custom notes and attributes like do_not_recommend; shows linker errors trimmed, colorized, symbol-suggestion and pkg-config based linking hints, and mentions implementing these ideas in a learning linker called Plinky; recommends snapshot testing (insta / cargo insta accept or rustc’s d-bless) and prioritizing diagnostics.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Helpful tools intro
- 1:29Rust's error messages
- 5:03Improving your errors
- 11:08Testing error messages
- 15:26Fixing linker errors
- 25:52Blinky linker experiment
- 28:23Error messages priority
- 30:50Q&A
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