Writing Rust

Overview

Rust house style. Applies whenever writing, reviewing, or modifying Rust code.

The two governing values: correctness over convenience, and pragmatic incrementalism. Use the type system aggressively to make invalid states unrepresentable, then evolve the design as patterns repeat rather than building speculative abstractions.

Correctness over convenience

• Model the full error space. No shortcuts or simplified error handling.
• Handle all edge cases: race conditions, signal timing, platform differences.
• Use the type system to encode correctness constraints (newtypes, exhaustive matching, #[must_use]).
• Prefer compile-time guarantees over runtime checks where possible.
• When uncertain, explore and iterate rather than assume.

User-facing error quality

Standard pairing: thiserror for structured error enums, miette for user-facing diagnostics with source spans, help text, and related errors. They are complementary -- thiserror defines the shape, miette adds the diagnostic layer on top.