// the find
graydon/rust-prehistory
historical archive of rust pre-publication development
A git-reconstructed archive of Rust's private development history from 2006–2009, assembled by Graydon Hoare from Monotone and Mercurial repositories before the language went public. This is primary source material for language researchers and Rust historians — the bootstrap compiler is in OCaml, the runtime in C/C++, and the design notes document decisions that shaped the language. You will not build anything from this.
The doc/notes/ directory is the real find: raw design notes on the type system, typestate, runtime model, and module system written as the author was working through the ideas — not retrospective documentation. The git grafting instructions are a practical touch; linking this to rust-lang/rust gives you continuous blame and log history from 2006 to present. The early .rs test files in src/test/ show what Rust syntax looked like before stabilization — channels, tasks, and typestate that were later removed or redesigned. And the bootstrap compiler's OCaml source (src/boot/) shows the era before Rust became self-hosting, which is an interesting toolchain decision in itself.
Graydon explicitly filtered out commits he found 'too embarrassing or too worthless,' so this is a shaped archive, not a raw dump — you're reading a reconstruction, not the actual history. Building it is essentially impossible: the OCaml bootstrap compiler and C++ runtime depend on LLVM and toolchain versions from circa 2009 that aren't preserved or documented. The date stitching between Monotone and Mercurial histories is acknowledged as rough, so git timestamps are approximate. There's no annotation layer — without deep knowledge of what Rust became, it's hard to tell which of the design sketches here survived versus were abandoned.