Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Add doc gen flags for lib, private, and all #14816

Open
wants to merge 7 commits into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from

Conversation

nobodywasishere
Copy link
Contributor

@nobodywasishere nobodywasishere commented Jul 17, 2024

Three new flags are added to the documentation generator:

  • --include-all will include everything in the namespace (stdlib, shards, project files)
    • this is useful for locally viewing all of the methods/objects available without needing to reference several different documentation pages
    • this is also useful for tooling, as running this command will provide the entire namespace/modules/types/methods/etc

image

  • --include-private will include all private methods
    • this is mostly intended for tooling, to allow knowing the private/protected methods of objects when doing autocomplete and the like

image

  • --include-lib will generate documentation for lib/fun/cstruct/union/typedef/etc
    • this is useful for autocomplete with tooling
    • this is also useful for libraries meant to bind a C library, to know what methods are available without reading the documentation

image
image
image
image

@nobodywasishere
Copy link
Contributor Author

One area this doesn't cover is includes in c structs, as TypeDeclarationVisitor hard-codes the included parts

@straight-shoota
Copy link
Member

straight-shoota commented Aug 5, 2024

This looks like a good idea. However, I think this topic needs more in-depth analysis and exploration of different angles before going for a solution.
For example, this might resolve the mentioned issues, but there is a very big field of different ways to utilize the doc generator. And I'd like to make an informed decision about how to address those needs.
This evaluation should probably go into the form of an RFC at https://github.com/crystal-lang/rfcs

Of course, it's tempting to just go with this as it's already implemented (and relatively simple). So it could be easily available.
But it comes with a risk to miss out on important details and use cases, and commiting to a solution that's not ideal in the bigger picture.

@nobodywasishere
Copy link
Contributor Author

Trying to put together an RFC, but I'm not sure there's enough here to warrant it, as this is a minor improvement upon what currently exists. I'm also not sure what further exploration there could be into this subject, or what part of this could be non-ideal in the future that also wouldn't apply to the docs generator itself as a whole.

This PR would enable more documentation for C bindings, and allow people to generate documentation for everything in their projects. It would also allow me to create a better development experience in VS Code. By having the entire top-level semantic, I can add better autocomplete/hover documentation/jump to definition, maybe even for static methods too, without the need to use an LSP.

Do you have any examples in mind of what details and use cases this misses that couldn't be fixed in future PRs? In my mind, this discussion and development belongs in #6947 (which should be turned into an RFC), independent of this PR.

@nobodywasishere
Copy link
Contributor Author

@straight-shoota If I were to create a separate PR just adding support for generating documentation for C bindings (lib/fun/type/enum/etc), would that be accepted? That part is somewhat separate from the discussion about getting all semantic information from the compiler, and the RFC I'm trying to put together for that.

@straight-shoota
Copy link
Member

straight-shoota commented Oct 14, 2024

Hm, this subset would certainly be easier to merge. However, I'd think it would be best to include the handling of lib types into the bigger discussion.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
3 participants