Functions on docs.rs
⚓ Rust 📅 2025-12-15 👤 surdeus 👁️ 1(This is an issue that's been bothering me for a long time now but now I found a good example.)
I'm looking for some iterator stuff and end up at: itertools - Rust
This is I guess the home page for the itertools crate?
I see here the list of functions the crate offers.
That doesn't look like a lot but I suppose that's it.
I click on Functions under "Crate Items" to the left, thinking that'll give me all the functions. No that takes me to the same place.
Clicking around blindly for a bit I come to a different list with a huge list of functions where I find out there is something called coalesce().
That's on this page:
Getting there from the home page requires clicking on "Traits" and then on the right trait (IterTools in this case). Given how most crates consists of more than a couple of traits this is kinda of a roulette action and often you'll be clicking around in circles trying to find where the functionality of a crate is hidden away.
(There are also very few affordances on the site so I never really have a sense of place or hierarchy and tend to get lost.)
itertools is relatively mainstream but I didn't know the function I was looking for nor did the homepage really give me any affordances to find it. This problem (it not being clear what functionality a crate offers) exists for pretty much every crate especially since most other crates have less documentation than this one.
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