Rust Scicomp Quarto Slides

Rust Scientific-Computing Quarto Slides

Use this skill for the Rust-specific parts of this repository's training material. Apply the general quarto-training-slides teaching approach for deck structure, audience boundary, speaker notes, and slide quality.

Rust Teaching Emphasis

• Prefer "why this matters for scientific computing" over generic Rust syntax coverage.
• Use small visible Rust fragments only when they introduce a concept clearly.
• Move longer code to terminal demos, live coding, or source-file inspection.
• Make ownership, borrowing, traits, error handling, reproducibility, and parallelism concrete through the repository examples.
• Name scientific-computing concerns directly: arrays, grids, random seeds, tolerances, data files, parallel loops, diagnostics, and reproducibility.

Repository Layout

• Learning-module sources live in learning-modules/.
• Slide sources live in slides-source/.
• Rust and companion examples live in source-code/.
• The published GitHub Pages landing page and generated assets live in docs/.
• Generated learning-module HTML is built into docs/learning-modules/.
• Generated Quarto slides are built into docs/slides/.
• The CI workflow owns generated site updates; keep source edits in learning-modules/ and slides-source/ unless regenerating output.

Quarto Defaults

Use revealjs with execute.eval: false. The Rust examples in this repository are Cargo projects rather than small executable Quarto cells, and the instructor usually runs them in a terminal.

For multi-module decks, use one top-level file such as slides-source/rust-good-bad-ugly.qmd that includes one section file per learning module. Included section files should start with a level-1 heading for the revealjs section title slide and level-2 headings for ordinary slides.

Rust Workflow

1. Read the source module in learning-modules/ and relevant examples under source-code/.
2. Identify Rust-specific teaching moments:
   • cargo check, cargo run, cargo test, or benchmark commands
   • compiler diagnostics worth discussing
   • source files that are better shown in an editor than copied onto slides
   • links between Rust language features and scientific-computing practice
3. Draft or update the matching slides-source/*.qmd section:
   • keep visible text trainee-facing
   • put trainer-only instructions in ::: notes
   • keep module title slides clean when the next slide is the Module Arc
   • use terminal cue slides for longer examples
4. Render with Quarto when possible and fix syntax or layout problems.

Publishing Workflow

For this repository, GitHub Pages is intentionally split:

• docs/README.md is the classic Jekyll landing page.
• mkdocs.yml builds the learning-module site from learning-modules/.
• .github/workflows/pages.yml builds MkDocs output into docs/learning-modules/, renders Quarto slides into docs/slides/, and commits those generated assets on pushes to the main branch.
• Source-code links in rendered learning modules are handled by scripts/link_source_code_refs.py after MkDocs has rendered the HTML.

When the published learning-module site should link to repository examples, post-process generated MkDocs HTML rather than hand-writing GitHub links in the module sources. Inline code spans such as source-code/math can be linked to GitHub main, while code blocks such as cd source-code/math should remain plain and copyable.

Draft Generator

For a first-pass deck from one Rust Markdown module, run:

python3 skills/rust-scicomp-quarto-slides/scripts/create_quarto_deck.py \
  learning-modules/scalar-computation-and-numeric-basics.md \
  --output slides-source/02-scalar-computation-and-numeric-basics.qmd

Then edit the generated .qmd. The script extracts headings, compact bullets, short Rust code blocks, Cargo/terminal cues, and source paths, but it cannot replace the instructor design pass.

Rust Slide Patterns

Terminal cue:

## Terminal: Compare Numeric Behavior

```{.bash}
cd source-code/math
cargo run
```

- Compare integer and floating-point division
- Check what happens for negative operands

::: notes
Switch to the terminal. Ask learners what they expect before running the
negative-operand example.
:::

Short Rust fragment:

## Explicit Conversion

```rust
let count: usize = values.len();
let mean = sum / count as f64;
```

- Rust makes conversion visible
- Choose whether the cast belongs here or at an API boundary

Rust-Specific Quality Checks

• Long Rust snippets should be replaced with a path and demo instruction.
• Every terminal cue should have a concrete command or file path.
• Cargo examples should run from the correct source-code/ subdirectory.
• Visible slide text should describe what trainees observe or compare, not what the trainer should say.

Source: gjbex/Rust-good-bad-ugly — distributed by TomeVault.