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https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory

historical archive of rust pre-publication development
https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory

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historical archive of rust pre-publication development

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README 

        
Rust Prehistory Repo - November 2016

====================================



Hi,



This is a reconstruction -- extracted and very lightly edited -- of the

"prehistory" of Rust development, when it was a personal project between

2006-2009 and, after late 2009, a Mozilla project conducted in private.



The purposes of publishing this now are:



  1. It might encourage someone with a hobby project to persevere

  2. It might be of interest to language or CS researchers someday

  3. It might settle some arguments / disputed historical claims



Edits made

----------



I have edited it from its original archival forms only in the following

ways:



  1. Converted from Monotone and Mercurial revision control

  2. Knitted together history by date, sometimes a bit roughly

  3. Deleted PDFs and other reference material I had put in the

     repository for reference, but I have no right to redistribute.

  4. Deleted commits or files that are, by my own judgment,

     too embarrassing or too worthless to publish.



Thus there are probably a number of historical states that are not

bit-identical to the form they were at the moment of initial writing -- I

know at least a couple edits might have broken the build in intermediate

states -- but they're as close as I can reasonably make them. This is an

honest attempt at a final word on the prehistory (and has taken some time

to dig up!)



Caveats (i.e. "don't expect much")

----------------------------------



While reading this -- if you're foolish enough to try -- keep in mind that

I was balanced between near-total disbelief that it would ever come to

anything and minuscule hope that if I kept at experiments and fiddling long

enough, maybe I could do a thing.



I had been criticizing, picking apart, ranting about other languages for

years, and making doodles and marginalia notes about how to do one "right"

or "differently" to myself for almost as long. This lineage represents the

very gradual coaxing-into-belief that I could actually make something that

runs.



As such, there are long periods of nothing, lots of revisions of position,

long periods of just making notes, arguing with myself, several false

starts, digressions into minutiae that seem completely absurd from today's

vantage point (don't get me started on how long I spent learning x86 mod

r/m bytes and PE import table structures, why?) and self-important

frippery.



The significant thing here is that I had to get to the point of convincing

myself there was something _there_ before bothering to show anyone; the

uptick in work in mid-to-late 2009 is when Mozilla started funding me on

the clock to work on it, but it's significant that there were years and

years of just puttering around in circles, the kind of snowball-rolling

that's necessary to go from nothing to "well .. maybe .."



I'd encourage reading it in this light: delusional dreams very gradually

coming into focus, not any sort of grand plan being executed.



Linking history in Git

----------------------



In order to browse the full history of the Rust project, you can link this

history with that of the [active Rust repository].  To do so, clone the Rust

repository, add a remote for the prehistory repository, then replace the first

commit in the Rust repository with the last commit in the prehistory (the last

one before the introduction of this README, to be more precise).



    git clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.git

    cd rust

    git remote add prehistory https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory.git

    git remote update prehistory

    git replace c01efc669f09508b55eced32d3c88702578a7c3e c10ce161d8a58d78e10583fcea7e34eab0a518d0



Now you should be able to see, for example, the full history of what "hello,

world" looked like in Rust over the years:



    git log -p --follow src/test/ui/hello.rs



[active Rust repository]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/



License

-------



I'm publishing this work with, as far as I can tell, permission of its

copyright holders: myself independently, and Mozilla Foundation. If you

feel I shouldn't have published this for some reason, please contact me and

I will happily discuss further. I tried to keep ownership and authorship

straight while working.



The current work is thereby licensed under the terms of the MIT/ASL2 dual

license scheme that the rest of Rust is licensed under. I do not expect

anyone cares about the license status, but there it is. If you feel like

reviving it for use in some sort of exercise in self-punishment, knock

yourself out.



-Graydon Hoare, November 2016