rustdoc: make static functions stand out better

[o11c]

Both me and some random guy on IRC today were reading the docs, and completely missed the fact that certain functions were static. They should visually stand out, even while just skimming.

[thestinger]

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

[o11c]

In most languages, self is not explicit, so people are not used to using it as the distinguisher of static vs nonstatic methods, and they are used to seeing the visually-distinct word static preceding static methods.

Even though Rust does things differently, there is no reason for it to give up visual distinctness.

[steveklabnik]

Triage: no change.

[steveklabnik]

Triage: still no changes. @rust-lang/rustdoc do we ever plan on implementing this?

[GuillaumeGomez]

If we do this, we'll have to think a lot about how we'll do it (on the UI side).

[QuietMisdreavus]

it could be as simple as sorting non-self functions above the rest, but that would probably surface another issue for items with multiple impl blocks. Since rustdoc currently groups methods together by their impl block (since they could have different conditions attached to them, different trait bounds or type parameters, or just being written in different files), it just grabs the impl as a whole. However, i think reordering the items within the impl will still get the majority of cases.

[GuillaumeGomez]

We should maybe just re-order items alphabetically in the first place.

[Mark-Simulacrum]

I'm going to close this as we don't have consensus (and, I, for one don't even think we should do anything here).