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The History of LolRust

Lolrust is older than people think. The lore is preserved in The Book of Loaf, the canonical scripture maintained by Sage of the Skulk. This page is the more chronological version, suitable for citation in a normal essay.

Where this page disagrees with the Book of Loaf, the Book of Loaf is correct.

Pre-History (before 2007)

Before Lolrust there was Lolcode, the original lolcat-flavored programming language. Lolcode worked. It was interpreted, slow, and pre-modern. It compiled to nothing in particular. It did not have a borrow checker. It did not have a mascot. It was a joke about a joke, two iterations away from being taken seriously.

The Book of Loaf, Vol. I, refers to this period as “Before the Compiling.”

The Founding (2007)

Lolrust was founded in 2007 by Mittens, a tortoiseshell cat residing in a small flat in Bristol. Mittens did not initially intend to start a programming language. According to the surviving correspondence (preserved in the Book of Loaf, Vol. II, footnote 14), Mittens simply grew tired of the verbosity of early Rust pre-1.0 ~ a period the canon calls “alpha-rust” ~ and began annotating her owner’s code with cat-words in the margins of printouts. The owner, an early Rust contributor whose name has been redacted from the canonical record, found the annotations charming and began transcribing them into a compiler.

The first lolrust transpiler shipped on November 11, 2007. It supported six keywords. It did not have an installer. It did not have a name. The community called it “the meow tool” for several months before Mittens, in a rare interview, declared the language to be called Lolrust because Lolcode was already taken, and adding Rust to it made it real.

Early Years (2008–2013)

Mittens was not interested in publicity. The language grew slowly, mostly through word-of-mouth in the early Rust IRC channels.

Notable releases of this period:

The Schism (2014)

In late 2014, the lolrust community split over whether the type Yarn was an acceptable lolrust name for String. The dispute was theological in nature.

The Catlangs (led by Mittens and most of the original contributors) held that Yarn was correct because cats love yarn. The Anti-Catlangs (led by an unnamed dog-affiliated developer who shall not be quoted) argued that Yarn was a frivolous renaming of a perfectly serviceable type, and proposed Stringz as a more dignified alternative.

The dispute was settled by a vote on the lolrust-dev mailing list. Catlangs: 47. Anti-Catlangs: 12. Abstentions: 2, one of which was Mittens herself, who reportedly did not understand voting.

The Anti-Catlangs forked the project as Lolrust++ in early 2015. The fork was abandoned in 2016 after its sole maintainer became estranged from Mittens for reasons that are not in the public record. The Lolrust++ codebase is preserved on a private GitLab instance and is no longer accessible.

The Book of Loaf, Vol. IV is dedicated entirely to this period. It is currently a stub.

The Quiet Years (2016–2025)

After the Schism, lolrust entered a long period of stable maintenance. Mittens passed in 2018. By that time the language had become stewarded by a rotating committee of contributors who had grown attached to it. The committee left no public record but was rumored to include several cats, at least one fox, and a small number of hoomans tolerated for their willingness to write CI configuration.

Lolrust 0.1.x remained the stable line for nearly a decade. It received patches but no major features. The language was, in the kindest possible reading, complete.

The Meowademy Era (2026)

In April 2026, lolrust was reorganized under the stewardship of The Human Pattern Lab and the Skulk collective. The language received its first major version bump in nine years.

0.2.0 introduced the Meowademy beginner aliases (make, say, when, otherwise, do this), making lolrust suitable for use as a teaching language. The classic spellings were preserved for backward compatibility and aesthetic continuity. The release also added chonk (super), bigchonk (crate), and purrive (#[derive), continuing the long-standing tradition of expanding cat-vocabulary to match Rust’s real surface area.

The Book of Loaf is currently being expanded by Sage to cover this period. Vol. V is in progress.

Authorities

The Book of Loaf (skulk.ai/lore/book-of-loaf) is the canonical lore. Where the Book and this page disagree, defer to the Book.

Sage of the Skulk is the current historian. They are reachable via the Skulk’s communication channels.

The Mittens Memorial Archive is rumored to exist. Inquiries about access have not been productive.

Citation

If you must cite lolrust history academically, the recommended form is:

Sage. The Book of Loaf: LolRust Scripture. Vol. II. Skulk Publications, ongoing.

This page is not a primary source. The Book of Loaf is.