miniblog.

Compiler error messages is such a deep topic. Even in rustc, a mature compiler that invests effort in diagnostic quality, I find interesting issues every few months. (The majority have been fixed pretty quickly, so it's really rewarding to file issues.)

Another unusual feature of Elm's error messages: it uses the first person ("I was partway through parsing a record, but I got stuck here"). It reads pretty well to me, but this is a surprisingly divisive topic.

Difftastic is effectively computing the "tree edit distance" between two ASTs, and there's a bunch of papers on this topic. Literature review is hard though: sometimes a paper takes a while to digest, only to realise that they're solving a slightly different problem.