Hello,
I have some experience in Rust, I think 2 years now, but steel I don't feel really comfortable doing heavy lifting with Text Processing in Rust when I compare it with other programming languages. Text processing is hard!
Text processing is at the core of what most work with computers is all about. We read strings in stream from files, sockets or web, we transform them in many complicated ways, then, we write them back or send them to other places.
From the most junior developer to the most advanced developer this is much of the work that we make, every day!
When the world was only ASCII it was really simple but with UTF-8 and unicode the world is a more complex beast! Much more complex beast. But the core of computer science is steel the same, it's text processing, binary data processing or numerical processing.
I see the last video of Jon Gjengset and Niko Matsakis about making things simpler for the newcomer, and I'm think with all the letters ... make a authoritative mdbook on Text Processing in Rust and everyone newcomers and more experience developers will forever thank you!
2022-04-18 Cross Team Collaboration Fun Times (CTCFT)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOkI7xZ35fE
Go full in with the topic, don't assume any prior knowledge, start from the basic, explain how all the API of strings and regex works and how it works in conjunction with related ones, fill the book with examples and give even common, useful and even advanced usage patterns for text processing in Rust. And exit with style with a reveberating long example, a simple editor in text mode with NCURSES or something like that. Show the thing working and give all readers and Rust enthusiasts the knowledge that they need to make the things that they already know how to make in other programming languages, in Rust. And some other new things
See for example:
Kibi: A text editor in ≤1024 lines of code, written in Rust
https://github.com/ilai-deutel/kibi
The best free resource that I could find on the WEB about Text processing in Rust was:
Text Processing in Rust
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/text-processing-rust
And it's well made, but it i not enough for the importance and real problem that text processing is for developers and that is not fulfilled with current resources.
Like I said this would be very important for the newcomer and for the more experience developer.
You could say, please write a normal payed book on the subject, right?, But this, Text Processing in Rust is a really core subject to a programming language that the community as a all would not collect the real knowledge benefits that such a resource cold give the community.
I have many payed books about Rust, but I think that there is currently nothing written, to my knowledge, that fulfills this real need.
Thank you very much!
The very best regards,
João