made in gimp, with <3
Context for actual rust programmers
I was having massive beef with the rust compiler yesterday, every cargo check takes 20 seconds.
And then look at the three functions below, only one of them are Send, if you know why, please let me know.
(Note: value that is not Send cannot be held across an await point, and Box<dyn Error> is not Send)
async fn one() {
let res: Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> = do_stuff();
if let Err(err) = res {
let content = err.to_string();
let _ = do_stuff(content).await;
}
}
async fn two() {
let res: Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> = do_stuff();
let content = if let Err(err) = res {
Some(err.to_string())
} else {
None
};
drop(res);
if let Some(content) = content {
let _ = do_stuff(content).await;
}
}
async fn three() {
let content = {
let res: Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> = do_stuff();
if let Err(err) = res {
Some(err.to_string())
} else {
None
}
};
if let Some(content) = content {
let _ = do_stuff(content).await;
}
}


No, Rust came later.
they didn’t say otherwise
They literally did. They theorized that Rust influenced GCC’s improved error messaging. That could not have happened if GCC improved their error messaging prior to the existence of Rust.
no they didn’t, yes it could have happened:
gcc is not a dead project. it is continuously maintained. its improvements can be influenced by other projects like rust
But GCC did not improve their error messages (much) prior to Rust, despite Clang’s error messages comparing favorably to GCC even before Rust 1.0 was released, as for example discussed in
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/ClangDiagnosticsComparison?action=recall&rev=1
Rust itself is 14 years old, slightly older than above wiki page, and even back then it had great error messages, though they’ve also improved since. Here’s a fun site where you can see how error messages have evolved through Rust’s life:
https://kobzol.github.io/rust/rustc/2025/05/16/evolution-of-rustc-errors.html
It’s only very recently that GCC has started to catch up, for example with some nice improvements in GCC 15:
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/04/10/6-usability-improvements-gcc-15
Oh, guess my mental timeline is wrong!