Polyglot docs sites are the wild west of technical writing
The Wild West of polyglot docs sites
When a project offers libraries in multiple programming languages, its documentation site must wrangle outputs from different API reference generators like Doxygen, rustdoc, and Sphinx. The author calls these 'polyglot docs sites' and explores two strategies: transforming generator output to fit one main generator, or publishing each generator's output as-is. The latter, used by pigweed.dev, results in a turducken-like architecture where subsites look different and have fragmented search and navigation. Solutions include a universal header and Pagefind for comprehensive search.
polyglot docs sites feel like a sparsely explored frontier of technical writing, full of rattlesnakes and tumbleweeds. And perhaps a little gold, too.