These forums seem to lack granularity. Am I missing something?

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I notice there are several Rust teams dedicated to specific issues relating to the overall Rust direction and experience. Based on that, I anticipated finding dedicated outlets for discussions about specific issues such as "syntax" or "beginner ergonomics" or "rust internals". When I look at this forum, I only see a handful of extremely broad sweeping categories.

I specifically wanted to write a post about some comments and questions I have regarding Rust Syntax as a newcomer to the language. I read most of "the book" and have compared Rust to many other languages, and I'd like to participate in discussions pertaining specifically to syntax. It doesn't feel right to just spin up a thread on this broad-sweeping forum. Is there somewhere more specific to discuss this?

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I know that you said that you really didn't want to post on such a broad forum, but this is probably the best place to put it. Stackoverflow would probably mark you down as too broad or just a bad question, and internals.rust-lang.org is more oriented around the creation and development of the rust compiler and stdlib. So, fire away, what have you got?

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That sounds like a great thread on this forum to me. It’s a general forum for a wide array of purposes.

In general, this place is for users to discuss using Rust, and the internals forum is used for the teams to discuss developing rust. Other than that, it’s intentionally very broad.

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As an example of a "forum" with a finer-grained classification structure, the Discord chat has quite a few channels along those lines, including a "beginners" group. It's clearly a very different style of conversation tool, and it seems to help more there.

I'm not sure if it was entirely deliberate, but I have come to like that the "help" category here does not distinguish between "beginners grappling with fundamentals" and, well, "everyone else grappling with fundamentals" :slight_smile:

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You originally categorized this post as #community, but I figured it seemed closer to #meta, since it's specifically about the forum instead of just generally about the community.

The fact that even THIS is a chance for controversy seems to show why we don't want to have a lot of categories. They're hard to teach, they tend to be calcified and non-agile, and what are you actually trying to accomplish with them anyway?

As for Discord... the primary purpose of its large number of categories is to work around the lack of support for topic threads.

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Geeze, I hardly even notice the categories. I just always use an unfiltered view. The rate of flow does not seem unmanageable.