HACKER Q&A
📣 zepearl

Why was the “Rust” programming language named like that?


I indirectly started asking myself this question yesterday & today while struggling to query Google with e.g. "rust ammonia keep cleaned elements" ("Ammonia" is an HTML lib which I just started to use to transform relative links to absolute in an HTML doc, and to then extract them), getting back results like "Cleaning metals: basic guidelines", "10 household items to help clean rust at home", etc... => I'm in a Google-search-bubble, argh :P

This thread

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16494822/why-is-it-called-rust#:~:text=TL%3BDR%3A%20Rust%20is%20named,incorporating%20new%20technology%20into%20it.

...mentions...

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

> It is also a substring of "robust".

...referring to this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/27jvdt/internet_archaeology_the_definitive_endall_source/

Is it really like that? Named after this fungus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28fungus%29 ?

Asking just because I'm curious (and annoyed about the SEO, but that's as well the fault of the "ammonia" lib - if I'll ever create a Rust lib I'll then call it "get_rid_of", hehe).


  👤 salawat Accepted Answer ✓
I always figure it was more because it was intended to challenge C as the "on the bare metal" language, eith the intent unpredictable code "flakes off" if you stick to the safe subset.

The plethora of chemistry puns then just sort of came along naturally. No clue on the crab though, unless it was a tongue in cheek reference to the phenomena by which things are said to inevitably evolutionarily converge toward crab, and that being a loose metaphor for the tendency of rust devs to implement X, but in Rust.