Intra Rustdoc Links by killercup · Pull Request #1946 · rust-lang/rfcs (original) (raw)
This will need a way to disambiguate between functions, traits, etc. It's completely valid to have a struct and function with the same name. Perhaps we could use URIs for this? function://path::to::fn, struct://path::to::struct, etc.
It only needs to distinguish between values (functions, constants) and types (structs, enums, traits, modules, type-aliases, primitives)
Rust has three namespaces - values, types, and macros. Everything is in one of those three and you don't need any more namespaces than that (it is a bit more complicated because some things can be in more than one namespace, tuple structs, iirc can be used both as type names and as function names). There are already alternate URLs in Rustdoc that use this scheme, unfortunately via redirects (I would love to deprecate the crazy ones with trait etc in the name, but there were back compat worries), these are easy to synthesise, e.g., https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/path/Path.t.html for https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/path/struct.Path.html, so you don't need to know the random rustdoc categorisation of a thing, only its namespace.