Evolution of Rust Compiler Errors

When I was first developing early versions of rustc I was really fascinated with Clang's effort at good error messages, which was helping it gain traction vs. GCC at the time, and I tried to start the Rust compiler project off on the right foot. I'm really glad that the Rust compiler dev community has continued to value great error messages: they're the UX of a compiler, and are every bit as important as UX of any other app.

I don't remember where, but I once heard someone talk about "error-message-driven-development" in Rust -- that is, using the error messages provided by rustc to guide you in your development process by way of fixing bugs in naively-written code. I even did a talk to several dozen engineers in my previous group about how fantastic it is: a newbie can write what they think is reasonable code, the compiler will reject the program but provide useful information, and the user can iteratively apply changes to the point where you can almost get things exactly as you want it. A lot of people who knew nothing about Rust were super impressed by the messages reported.

Many thanks to you and others that have toiled at this incredible UX!