When you start documenting a language from scratch, you have to start at the beginning. A language is a huge project as well. The current book is about ~250 pages when rendered as a PDF. I've finally gotten to the point where the basics of almost everything have been documented, and am starting to move on to more intermediate style things.
In addition, we've only had a stable Rust for six weeks: there just hasn't been enough time to write more advanced things. Nobody wants to invest in stuff while things are still changing. As an example of this, I know there's an O'Reilly book coming out in the fall which covers advanced topics exclusively.
I love the rust docs, but I do agree that the intermediate/advanced stuff is missing. I won't feel like I truly understand until I can implement a bunch of different datastructures, and it turns out that that is exactly the kind of code that throws up lifetime issues that as a beginning rust programmer I'm not really prepared to deal with.
I'd love a 'learn to write rust with datastructures' style intermediate tutorial.
I don't want to make you rewrite this if you've already answered this elsewhere, but...
Could you provide some pointers about how to begin with contributing to the Rust documentation? What are the areas that need the most help or have received the most complaints/confused reactions? I actually like writing docs but I'm not sure where I'd begin. (And of course not super confident in my understanding of Rust in the first place since I'm still learning it myself. But I know a lot more than someone looking at it for the first time.)
I'd love to have some contributions! One easy way to contribute is to find something that doesn't currently have any examples, and add some. http://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/documentation.html is a basic guide to writing docs, and I'm quite happy to workshop a PR with some basics into something more.
Currently, the areas that need most help fall into two categories: intermediate/advanced docs, and API documentation. The latter is an easier place to get started, I'd imagine. Hence my suggestion of examples.
One thing you can do if you'd like to help with docs is to flesh out Rust By Example: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-by-example . It began as a community project but was then adopted by the core developers at the behest of the community, but it's seen much less love than the official docs. If you're interested you'd be largely free to make it your own. :)
In addition, we've only had a stable Rust for six weeks: there just hasn't been enough time to write more advanced things. Nobody wants to invest in stuff while things are still changing. As an example of this, I know there's an O'Reilly book coming out in the fall which covers advanced topics exclusively.
A basic task pool isn't too many lines of code: https://github.com/rust-lang/threadpool/blob/master/src/lib.... Hopefully that can help for that case, though obviously, this isn't just a comment about threadpools :)