I was a big advocate of adding error codes. I don't remember specifically the timeline, but we had so much stuff to do for 1.0, it doesn't surprise me that it got pushed back a bit.
At the time, I was thinking about the big old chunky Visual Basic manuals I used to own, and how useful those were.
> This implements the minimal scaffolding that allows mapping diagnostic messages to alpha-numeric codes, which could improve the searchability of errors. In addition, there's a new compiler option, `--explain {code}` which takes an error code and prints out a somewhat detailed explanation of the error.
committed on Jul 10, 2014
I think I've figured out what happened here: the particular error that was chosen didn't have a code until 1.2. The example from this commit does show a code on Rust 1.0.0: https://godbolt.org/z/14hcb3ETG
My recollection is that Brian Anderson, who came from the C# world, was an early advocate of the easily-googlable error codes that Microsoft compilers use a lot, and pushed to get them in. That was a good call. (In general Brian had a lot of behind-the-scenes positive influence on Rust: my favorite brson-ism is "if the code doesn't have a test it doesn't exist".)
Yeah this PR cites it as explicitly a continuation of Bryan’s work. I never did any implementation work on errors, I was just a big fan of the codes concept.
At the time, I was thinking about the big old chunky Visual Basic manuals I used to own, and how useful those were.
EDIT: okay, so I'm doing some digging: error codes were added before 1.0... https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/0e80dbe59ea986ea53c...
> This implements the minimal scaffolding that allows mapping diagnostic messages to alpha-numeric codes, which could improve the searchability of errors. In addition, there's a new compiler option, `--explain {code}` which takes an error code and prints out a somewhat detailed explanation of the error.
committed on Jul 10, 2014
I think I've figured out what happened here: the particular error that was chosen didn't have a code until 1.2. The example from this commit does show a code on Rust 1.0.0: https://godbolt.org/z/14hcb3ETG