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Why is the Rust programming language called "Rust"?

Is there anything known about who named it, and why? (I am having a hard time coming up with a positive association).

Thilo
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    A theory I've occasionally seen hinted at on Reddit/IRC/mailing-list is that the goal of the language is to use tried-and-true techniques (i.e. rusty), rather than implement cutting edge experimental features. No idea of the truth of it though. – huon May 11 '13 at 09:24
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    "Rust" makes me, personally, think "close to the metal", suggesting good performance (but I try not to think of it as eating away at the silicon :-) – antinome Feb 14 '14 at 23:03

2 Answers2

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There is a thread on reddit that claims the answer.

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

It is also a subsequence of "robust".

Found another interesting quote:

Also, calling Rust a research language is funny to me because -- as its name reflects -- we've tried hard to avoid incorporating new technology into it. We haven't always succeeded at failing to be novel, but we have a rule of thumb of not including any ideas in the language that are new as of the past ten years of programming language research. The field of programming language is full of old technology that hasn't been put to use in solving problems that it's exactly suited for. The goals with Rust were to avoid reinventing wheels, and see what the past had to teach us. I can't blame anyone for thinking Rust is a research language, though, since it is being developed by Mozilla Research.

So this alludes to "exclusively relying on old technology and shunning the new".

Again, I get the "old" implication of "rust", but still cannot get over the "will eventually corrode to junk metal" association.

autf
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Thilo
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It's by analogy to web browser architecture. The user-interface parts of mozilla are often called "chrome", because they're supposed to be shiny (this was the case even before the chrome browser came along). And in Firefox, a lot of chrome code is implemented in javascript.

Rust, on the other hand, is intended for implementing the guts of the browser; the non-chrome parts. The name makes me think of big metal gears meshing together deep in the bowels of some giant machine.

Mitch Skinner
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