Evolution of Rust Compiler Errors

I recently attended RustWeek (which was totally awesome) and the talks by Alex Crichton (on the history of Rust) and Pietro Albini (on the importance of error messages) inspired me to do a little archaeology into the way Rust compiler messages have evolved over time. I wrote a script that downloaded all stable Rust releases all the way back to 1.0, executed each stable version of the compiler on a set of small programs containing an error and gathered the compiler standard (error) output. The widget below visualizes how the error messages evolved over time. You can use the select box to examine different Rust programs to see their error: Moved variable Wrong field Missing implementation Swapped arguments Wrong argument type Borrow check error Missing where bound Unused variable There are a couple of interesting things to note: First and foremost, the error messages are simply great. If you have used Rust previously, this probably isn’t too surprising. Even Rust 1.0.0 contained pre ... Read full article.