this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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But GCC did not improve their error messages (much) prior to Rust, despite Clang's error messages comparing favorably to GCC even before Rust 1.0 was released, as for example discussed in
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/ClangDiagnosticsComparison?action=recall&rev=1
Rust itself is 14 years old, slightly older than above wiki page, and even back then it had great error messages, though they've also improved since. Here's a fun site where you can see how error messages have evolved through Rust's life:
https://kobzol.github.io/rust/rustc/2025/05/16/evolution-of-rustc-errors.html
It's only very recently that GCC has started to catch up, for example with some nice improvements in GCC 15:
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/04/10/6-usability-improvements-gcc-15
Oh, guess my mental timeline is wrong!