I gave a talk called “Navigating the Open Seas” at Rustcamp today– loosely based on my last blog post :) Here are links to everything I mentioned in the talk in case you’d like to learn more about these parts of Rust’s history!

• Introduction

  • RFC 134 that proposed removing the ' sigil from the lifetime syntax. I called out this comment of Patrick’s in particular to illustrate the value of Rust’s open development to future language designers who will be in this hypothetical state he proposed for every decision they’ll be making.

• Exploration #1 - into the rust-dev mailing list

  • The rust-dev mailing list, active from July 2010-Jan 2015. Replaced by the users and internals discourse installations.

  • The rust-dev mailing list on nabble, which I prefer because of the search available there.

  • Oct 28, 2011 Renaming “tag” and “log_err” mailing list thread - the 21 message long mailing list thread that announces that the std library now has print/println, wonders if Rust should have a prelude, and discusses the renaming of “tag”, which is what ends up as “enum” today.

• Exploration #2 - where did the lifetime elision rules come from?

  • The lifetime elision rules in TRPL

  • The markdown source of the lifetime page in the book

  • Github’s rendering of git log src/doc/trpl/lifetimes.md

  • Github’s rendering of git blame src/doc/trpl/lifetimes.md

  • Github’s rendering of git blame -L 269 src/doc/trpl/lifetimes.md

  • Github’s rendering of git show ab3cb8c5

  • Github’s rendering of git blame ab3cb8c5~ src/doc/trpl/ownership.md

  • Github’s rendering of git show a56e7aee, where the lifetime elision section was added to the docs

  • Issue #19662 for adding documentation about all forms of lifetime elision

  • The rules as proposed in RFC 141

  • RFC 141 PR discussion

• Exploration #3 - What happened to iface?

  • A sample message on the rust-dev mailing list that mentions iface, that doesn’t exist today

  • Commit eb834fdb that stopped parsing iface

  • Lindsey Kuper’s intern presentation video that talked about her work unifying trait and iface

  • The rust-wiki-backup repository

  • The proposal for unifying traits and interfaces in the wiki history

• Conclusion

  • Where the IRC logs before April 2013 would be if irclog.gr hadn’t loaded the data with ajax