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A Sad Day for Rust

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21–30 of 1001 posts

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#21
> “Why Reddit is like this” is a whole other essay; I think it’s built into reddit’s structure itself.

Classic Eternal September.

Around 60k subscribers, the cultural identity starts degrading, as the amount of "old guard" is outmatched by "new blood." Therefore, the old "monkey see, monkey do" phenomenon, where new users would slowly mimic the culture of the prevailing older users to "fit in," is replaced with new users mimicking other new users, and the culture shifting towards the platform's identity instead of retaining the sub's identity.

Generally, the type of person to post on Reddit frequently enough, has social cohesion problems that may preclude him from fulfilling his social needs through more healthy avenues, like real life. The same is true for the majority of people that post online frequently. Usually the pyschological profile that follows that point is one built on abrasiveness, distrust and aggression towards authority, an inability to adopt social manners and participate in social contract, low emotional intelligence, etc.

All of the aforementioned behaviors culminate into the toxicity and vitriol you usually see -- and as well why it's so prevalent.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#22
post #4

It brings up the question — as a developer, how can you best set boundaries on your customers so that you can have some degree of control over the toxicity of the culture that you're exposed to when interacting with them?

Perhaps popular libs should have a community maintainer volunteer to buffer these kinds of issues if developers need some distance from the community.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#23

> Rust has a necessary feature, unsafe, that allows you to escape Rust’s guarantees. This is a really important part of Rust, but also a very dangerous one, hence the name. But one of the things that’s important about it is that, since unsafe means “I have checked this code, and it upholds all of the guarantees the compiler cannot check,” you can build a safe interface with unsafe guts. This blew my mind. I had no id…

JetBrains does sponsor the development of the Rust plugin, IIRC.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#24
post #16
post #6

I don't know how to word this so I'll say it bluntly (and probably bear the blunt of this community as a consequence): If you're a developer of a project that is used in a security-sensitive context, you either be receptive to security concerns or you clearly label your project as a toy project. No one expects you to write perfect code, but we do expect you to fix flaws when you learn about them. Of course, you could…

I'm not sure which license was used by actix-web, but let me quote the last section of the MIT license as a reply: > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILIT…

IANAL but I'm fairly certain this protects you against legal action and not negativity on the internet.

Furthermore, if we're to interpret this clause as "do not place any trust in this software whatsoever" then I guess that's really bad news for the security community at large.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#26
post #6

I don't know how to word this so I'll say it bluntly (and probably bear the blunt of this community as a consequence): If you're a developer of a project that is used in a security-sensitive context, you either be receptive to security concerns or you clearly label your project as a toy project. No one expects you to write perfect code, but we do expect you to fix flaws when you learn about them. Of course, you could…

> No one expects you to write perfect code, but we do expect you to fix flaws when you learn about them.

It's not like he was getting paid to work on this, was it? And people do have a life beyond open source. People could have forked and worked on the issues themselves, but that's asking too much. Why do the hard work when you can just write a comment/tweet blaming someone else, right?

Your comment is precisely what entitlement looks like.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#27
post #11

I actually think the "code of conduct" culture that Rust embodies exacerbates this kind of drama. Ironically, it creates a more unsafe environment where everyone feels anxious and judged by the CoC Police. Under the CoC, I am entitled to a wonderful experience, and if I don't get it, the culture has failed in its commitment to me.

This kind of drama has happened many, many, many times, in many places where there's no code of conduct.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#28

Tried reading through this but without context it’s very unclear what has happened. Can someone familiar with Rust and it’s communities explain from a high level what all this is about?

[deleted]

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#29
post #9

I can see where Steve is coming from about the difficulties of maintainer-ship - I only have a few projects that I am actively maintaining and obviously nothing close to the scale of a popular library. But at the same time I really think almost all of the blame in this case rests solely with the reception (or lack thereof entirely) of PRs/issues that are intending to improve the quality of a library that many people…

The problem is that people didn't choose Actix only for performance. I personally haven't used Actix, but it seems that all other contenders were lacking in some way, not only performance but also feature sets and flexibility and easiness. And thus we are now left with a horde of safe but otherwise lacking libraries instead of what could possibly be the best of breeds.

That's entirely fair - and I wasn't saying that choosing actix was a bad choice at the time for the users - but I also think that the people who were willing to contribute to Actix to make it safer are probably also the type of people who are willing to contribute to those other libraries to make them more useful.

If there is one trend that has been consistent in the development world it has been that there are always people willing to keep iterating on libraries to get better and better implementations.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#30

Question: why didn’t the more safety-focused developers just fork the project? I feel like fork-o-phobia causes 90% of the incidents like this.

Forking is extremely aggressive, and just because someone has the time to write a patch doesn't mean they have the desire or time to run a project.
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