&gt; as much as header files suck, they let you skim an API much more easily than Rust or Swift<p>Just to reply to this individual point, rustdoc is <i>fantastic</i>. Personally I much prefer having an HTML-rendered &quot;header file&quot; for a crate&#x27;s API. Even if they aren&#x27;t hosted, it&#x27;s trivial to generate one yourself using `cargo doc`. To be maximally useful, the author needs to have made doc comments, but at least there&#x27;s a standard format for that, and you might not have anything like that in a header file anyways.