Aquascope: Look Beneath the Surface of Rust
What is the project about?
Aquascope is a tool designed to help users understand Rust's borrow checker and program execution by generating interactive visualizations. It shows how the borrow checker conceptually analyzes a program and how the program runs step-by-step.
What problem does it solve?
Rust's ownership and borrowing system, while powerful for ensuring memory safety, can be challenging for newcomers and even experienced programmers to grasp. Aquascope aims to make these concepts more intuitive and easier to understand by providing visual representations of the underlying mechanisms. It helps to debug the borrow checker errors.
What are the features of the project?
- Interactive visualizations: Generates diagrams that show the state of a Rust program, including ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes.
- mdBook integration: Can be used as a preprocessor for mdBook, allowing easy embedding of visualizations within documentation or learning materials.
- Step-by-step execution: Illustrates how a program executes, showing the changes in ownership and borrowing over time.
- Research-based: Developed as part of academic research on how people learn Rust.
What are the technologies used in the project?
- Rust: The core of Aquascope is written in Rust.
- mdBook: Used for integrating Aquascope visualizations into documentation.
- cargo-make: A Rust build tool.
- Depot: A Javascript build tool.
- Miri: Used as an interpreter for analyzing Rust programs.
- Specific nightly toolchain of rust.
What are the benefits of the project?
- Improved understanding: Makes Rust's ownership and borrowing concepts more accessible.
- Easier debugging: Helps users visualize and understand borrow checker errors.
- Educational resource: Provides a valuable tool for learning and teaching Rust.
- Interactive learning: The interactive nature of the visualizations enhances engagement and comprehension.
What are the use cases of the project?
- Learning Rust: Newcomers can use Aquascope to grasp the fundamentals of ownership and borrowing.
- Teaching Rust: Educators can incorporate Aquascope into their materials to explain complex concepts visually.
- Debugging Rust code: Developers can use Aquascope to understand and resolve borrow checker errors.
- Documentation: Rust library authors can use Aquascope to create interactive documentation that clarifies how their code interacts with the borrow checker.
- Research: Researchers can use and extend Aquascope for further studies on programming language learning and understanding.
