RDocEdit

RDoc is, or was, the de facto standard for producing documentation from code comments embedded inline in Ruby and C extension code. At the time of writing (October 2010) it is rapidly being displaced by superior alternatives such as YARD.

Principal criticisms of RDoc include:

  • slow
  • buggy
  • inconsistent
  • stagnated development
  • ugly default output
  • brittle parser extremely sensitive to input variation
  • large disparity between capabilities of Ruby parser and C parser, making documentation for C extensions in C files basically infeasible
  • inadequate escaping options

See also