I recently attended RustWeek (which was totally awesome) and the talks by Alex Crichton (on the history of Rust) and Pietro Albini (on the importance of error messages) inspired me to do a little archaeology into the way Rust compiler messages have evolved over time. I wrote a script that downloaded all stable Rust releases all the way back to 1.01, executed each stable version of the compiler on a set of small programs containing an error and gathered the compiler standard (error) output. The w...