Context Generic Programming by Example: A Quick and Dirty Guide

[rljacobson]

For my own personal study, I spent time with an LLM creating this single collection of straightforward examples:

• Repo: https://github.com/rljacobson/cgp-by-example/tree/main
• Rendered: https://www.robertjacobson.dev/cgp-by-example/

It's not much and not especially comprehensive, but I find it helpful to "cut to the point" of how to use CGP.

But my real reason to share this is actually to encourage you to keep working on your book at https://patterns.contextgeneric.dev/. I suspect even the "missing" content you seem to have planned is outdated, as I am sure you have through of even more topics already.

Thank you!

[soareschen]

Hi @rljacobson, thanks for creating and sharing this! It is certainly valuable for you and other community members to write your own guides and posts to teach others about CGP. This kind of content helps not only in terms of available resources, but also in terms of credibility and social impact.

For the documentation content, I am increasingly working on removing almost all of the internal machinery of CGP and hiding it behind macros with syntax that is familiar to developers from an object-oriented programming background. The evidence is becoming clear that Rust developers will not adopt CGP if it requires even a basic level of understanding of generics and traits. Therefore, I am trying to ensure that developers do not need to see any generic syntax, at least in the beginner-level learning materials.

As a result, the learning material in the CGP Patterns book would be considered intermediate or even advanced level content. It would only be useful for readers who are willing to look behind the macros to understand how CGP works internally. However, developers would likely only reach this stage after they have first experimented with basic uses of CGP through the macros and syntactic sugars.

If you would like to use an LLM to generate content for CGP, I would highly recommend using the new CGP Skills that I am developing. Due to limited time, I am focusing on writing documentation that targets the LLM first, and then using the LLM to generate documentation for developers with different backgrounds.

However, I am still finishing a few remaining key features before I can concentrate on documentation. These new features are syntactic sugars that will further simplify how CGP code looks, and they will affect how the beginner-level documentation should be explained. For this reason, I have avoided writing the full documentation now so that it will not become outdated immediately after the new release.