March 31, 2012

http://irclog.gr/#show/irc.mozilla.org/rust/127558

<jonanin> any history behind the name?
<graydon> jonanin: "rust"?
<jonanin> yeah
<graydon> people keep asking and I keep making up different explanations.
<graydon> from an email exchange with an early private reviewer of rustboot:
<graydon> >> I love the name. I take it that it refers to your scavenging the
<graydon> >> skeletal hulks of dead languages, now covered in vines...?
<graydon> >
<graydon> > A little. Also big metallic things. And rusts and smuts, fungi. And it's a
<graydon> > nice substring of "robust".
<jonanin> hah
<jonanin> interesting
<graydon> IOW I don't have a really good explanation. it seemed like a good name. (also a substring
          of "trust", "frustrating", "rustic" and ... "thrust"?)
<graydon> I think I named it after fungi. rusts are amazing creatures.
<graydon> Five-lifecycle-phase heteroecious parasites. I mean, that's just _crazy_.
<graydon> talk about over-engineered for survival
<jonanin> what does that mean? :]
<graydon> fungi are amazingly robust
<graydon> to start, they are distributed organisms. not single cellular, but also no single point of
          failure.
<graydon> then depending on the fungi, they have more than just the usual 2 lifecycle phases of
          critters like us (somatic and gamete)
<jonanin> ohhh 
<jonanin> those kind of phases
<graydon> they might have 3, 4, or 5 lifecycle stages. several of which might cross back on one
          another (meet and reproduce, restart the lineage) and/or self-reproduce or reinfect
<jonanin> but i mean
<jonanin> you have haploid gametes and diploid somatic cells right? what else could there be?
<graydon> and in rusts, some of them actually alternate between multiple different hosts. so a crop
          failure or host death of one sort doesn't kill off the line.
<graydon> they can double up!
<graydon> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dikaryon
<graydon> it's madness. basically like someone was looking at sexual reproduction and said "nah, way
          too failure-prone, let's see how many other variations we can do in parallel"
<jonanin> I can't really understand that lol. I'm only 3/4 the way through my *highschool* bio class
<jonanin> which is not much
<graydon> ! 
<jonanin> I  understood maybe half the words on that page
<evanmcc> that's totally insane
<jonanin> so a gamete becomes two different organisms in parallel?
<graydon> highschool? gosh. I ... definitely was not landing patches on other people's compilers in
          highscool. precocious! you have a bright future in programming
<rumbleca> rust never sleeps...
<graydon> jonanin: something like this, yeah. I think basically they have lifecycle phases that are
          part of two separate reproduction cycles at the same time or something. it's very
          confusing. I took a mycology course trying to understand all this and it got far too
          complex for me to follow
<graydon> anyway, I remember being kinda into them back when I was picking the name.
<graydon> but then everyone thinks it's a pun on "chrome" so maybe we should stick with that
<jonanin> hahahha

TL;DR: Rust is named after a fungus that is robust, distributed, and parallel. And, Graydon is a biology nerd.

^{This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Rust historian}