architecture.md

Architecture

This document explains the high-level architecture of diff.rs. It is intended as an explainer that is useful for people to quickly get up to speed on how it works.

Code Structure

Currently, diff.rs is a single-page web application implemented in Rust using Yew. It is structured like this:

• src/main.rs is the binary entrypoint. It sets up logging and the Yew rendering.
• src/lib.rs is the library entrypoint. It defines the routing and re-exports definitions. The router will map every route to a view.
• src/views/ contains views, these are the root components for entire pages. There is one module per view. Every module exports a single view, but can also contain private components which are only used in that particular view.
• src/components/ contains components which are re-used across views.
• src/tailwind.css contains styles for the components and views.
• index.html contains the skeleton and metadata for Trunk for which assets to build and bundle.

See also Contributing for more information of the structure.

Fetching Crate Info

To render a diff, it uses gloo to make a request to the crates.io API in order to fetch crate metadata. This is a JSON structure that is parsed into a CrateResponse using serde and serde_json.

Diffing Crates

Using that response, the code will resolve the versions that are in the URL by looking them up in the versions field of that response. If they exist, the code then performs another request to fetch the crate sources. These are gzip-compressed tar balls, which are decompressed using flate2 and extracted in-memory using tar.

Finally, the code uses similar to generate a diff and render it in the browser. It uses the syntect for syntax highlighting.