The Rust conspiracy

Today I was notified by a dear friend of mine about a fact that lead me to think about the Rust project a lot. I came to the conclusion that the whole project, including but not limited to its most famous contributors such as Graydon Hoare, Alex Crichton and Niko Matsakis.

This plot has been on-going for a long, long time. In fact, it started even before Rust 1.0 was released in May 2015! I suspect that the plot was even started before the Roadmap planning of Rust 1.0 in 2014, but this is only a (probably good) guess. I do not have any proof of it, and of course the people that were involved with the process of bringing Rust 1.0 to live would deny anything I claim here (I guess).

But I think this guess is a rather good one. In the mentioned Roadmap it was planned to release every 6 weeks, and this is what I base that guess on. They made it fix right there. When Rust 1.0 came out on 15th of May in 2015 – which is a rather odd date, to be honest: 2015-05-15, or 5/15/15 in US notation, the plot must have been made fix already. Maybe I'm on another trace there with this date, as 51515 almost looks like 666, but this is something I will dig into in another blog post.

So when they made it fix, the already had said plot in the back of their heads. What that ominous plot is, you ask? Well... it is as simple as this:

Rust 1.60.0 came out on 7th of April 2022. Thinking forward for 9 releases, we can easily calculate that Rust 1.69.0 will be released on 20th of April 2023, or rather: 4/20 of 2023.

That's it, there it is! They have planned it all along! We've been fooled and tricked for years!

Now that I've shown that all these maintainers, hard thinkers and these hours and hours of effort put into planning, preparation of talks, discussions on various channels all over the internet but also in real-world (“offline”) were just spent to fool us into a conspiracy of putting together funny numbers on some release note, I can go back to my quiet chamber and think a bit more about that 5/15/15.


Of course this article is a joke and nothing here is meant serious, except that all these people indeed this a very good job and put numberless hours into making Rust awesome!

Also note that if you use the original date for the calculation, everything falls apart, sadly.