Contributing to the rustc Development Guide: Instructions and Tips

You may also find the rustdocs [for the compiler itself][rustdocs] useful. Note that these are not intended as a guide; it's recommended that you search for the docs you're looking for instead of reading them top to bottom. For documentation on developing the standard library, see [`std-dev-guide`](https://std-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/). ### Contributing to the guide The guide is useful today, but it has a lot of work still to go. If you'd like to help improve the guide, we'd love to have you! You can find plenty of issues on the [issue tracker](https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc-dev-guide/issues). Just post a comment on the issue you would like to work on to make sure that we don't accidentally duplicate work. If you think something is missing, please open an issue about it! **In general, if you don't know how the compiler works, that is not a problem!** In that case, what we will do is to schedule a bit of time for you to talk with someone who **does** know the code, or who wants to pair with you and figure it out. Then you can work on writing up what you learned. In general, when writing about a particular part of the compiler's code, we recommend that you link to the relevant parts of the [rustc rustdocs][rustdocs]. ### Build Instructions To build a local static HTML site, install [`mdbook`](https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook) with: ``` cargo install mdbook mdbook-linkcheck2 mdbook-toc mdbook-mermaid ``` and execute the following command in the root of the repository: ``` mdbook build --open ``` The build files are found in the `book/html` directory. ### Link Validations We use `mdbook-linkcheck2` to validate URLs included in our documentation. Link checking is **not** run by default locally, though it is in CI. To enable it locally, set the environment variable `ENABLE_LINKCHECK=1` like in the following example. ``` ENABLE_LINKCHECK=1 mdbook serve ``` ### Table of Contents We use `mdbook-toc` to auto-generate TOCs for long sections. You can invoke the preprocessor by including the `` marker at the place where you want the TOC. ## Synchronizing josh subtree with rustc This repository is linked to `rust-lang/rust` as a [josh](https://josh-project.github.io/josh/intro.html) subtree. You can use the following commands to synchronize the subtree in both directions.

The rustc development guide is open for contributions. The text explains that you don't need to be an expert to contribute and can collaborate with someone who knows the code. It also recommends linking to relevant parts of rustc rustdocs. Instructions are provided for building the guide locally using mdbook, enabling link validations, and generating table of contents. Finally, the text explains how to synchronize a josh subtree with rustc.