Presenting the Rust quotes from the Mozilla QDB

Early Rust development was coordinated on the Mozilla IRC network, and back then we were entertained by the Mozilla “QDB” (quotes database), which once lived at quotes.burntelectrons.org, maintained by Grey Hodge.

That site no longer exists and the database no longer available. For a number of years I quested to get a copy of it, and then I got a copy of it, and then I just sat on it for a few more years. But now I’ve extracted the Rust quotes and made them available again at https://brson.github.io/rust-qdb/.

Here are some choice memories:

<erickt> is it just me, or did compiling rust just
         become a lot slower?
<brson> compiling rustc became a lot slower because it
        grew my almost 9kloc this week
<erickt> Sad. It now seems to take a minute+ to link a stage
         on my laptop
<pcwalton> hopefully CCI will help
<erickt> what's that?
<pcwalton> cross-crate inlining
<pcwalton> the reason that rust grew 9kloc


<rntz> "match (match ...) { ... }" aha, finally my favorite SML
       idiom comes to rust
<graydon> we'll be linear ML yet if it kills us
<graydon> (with macros. in BCPL clothing.)
<graydon> (how did this happen?)
<rntz> well...
<rntz> it's linear ML because: you hired a bunch of PL geeks to
       help make a language, what did you expect?
<rntz> it has macros because: you hired a bunch of PL geeks to
       help make a language, what did you expect?
<rntz> it looks like BCPL because: you need to convert the C++
       programmers, apparently


<pcwalton> Luqman: I think we should put a limit on the
           levenshtein distance ;)
<pcwalton> /Users/pwalton/Source/rust/master/src/libcore/task/local_data.rs:85:17: 85:34
           error: unresolved name: `rt::rust_get_task`.
           Did you mean: `modify_fn`?


<mib_lyavkj> So, who thought it was a good idea to name this
             language after iron oxide?
<aatch> mib_lyavkj, no idea, who though it was a good idea to
        name a language after a letter in the alphabet?
<mib_lyavkj> Exactly!
<aatch> Or a family of snakes, or crystalline aluminium oxide
<mib_lyavkj> I'd much rather use rust or Go, but at least python
             sounds cool! Hardly anyone creates cool names for
             these things.
<aatch> Well there are three languages named after one guy.
<brendanc> You're talking about Dylan Oberon Pascal?

The source for this is at https://github.com/brson/rust-qdb, and I have also taken the liberty of including the full raw database dump if others want to dig through it for e.g. non-rust stuff.

All the thanks to Grey Hodge who responded to my emails, dug up the database dump and the source code and provided it to me.