A Sad Day for Rust

Python has many of the same issues, where core devs and key maintainers go dark or behave badly. What Python does do pretty well, and what I like about it, is placing its core user front and center. For Python, that is the beginning programmer, and Python has a lot of empathy for him or her. What I also like about Python is a general willingness to have difficult conversations and back rebuttals with code snippets.

I read difficult conversations by Bruce Patton a while back, and it wasn’t an easy read for me because I have problems of responding sometimes in a constructive manner, but I learned a lot and I would highly recommend it .

I’m confident the Rust community will survive this and come out stronger than ever :)

There are people who forget that open-source does not entitle you to anything (read the fucking license).

Maintainers of large projects are not even allowed to have a bad day, to make a brusque comment, or to disagree with a majority -- without someone trying to stir up a lynch mob. It sickens me the lack of balance between the work done by the maintainers, and the expectations of random users.

If it doesn't meet your standards, don't use it.

Alternatively, go fork yourself.

Imagine how much the maintainer must has been burned, in order to take the decision to shut down their entire love-work – in hope that the toxic situation will stop.

From our point of view, this may not be the best decision. A desperate one, maybe. But to imagine how the person must be feeling to think this is the best way out.

2. Perhaps actix focused more on TechEmpower benchmarks (if you follow fafhrd91 on GH, you'd see the number of times he forks TE's repo, presumably submitting PRs). I think having a library that's #1 for many benchmarks attracts users, not all of which will be hobbyists working on toy projects. The concerns (some valid, most not) about unsafe were bound to be there.

3. The dismissal of `unsafe` alternatives was often a challenge (from the comments that I saw, especially before his first instance of walking away), which wasn't handled well by "us" the religious cult. I don't know why he came back after the first instance last year, but what many of us saw was the toxicity of Reddit when it came to actix. I think fafhrd91 asked for people to co-maintain last time, which did see an increase in contributors.

4. Part of us building a community will be many of us acknowledging that "Performance" is not the sole goal of every Rust project. There are sometimes people who will suggest a huge deviation in a project because of some micro-optimisation or because they want a feature which might not make sense for everyone else. So I hear what you're saying about the hardships of maintainership because things can go pretty wild if one tries to please everybody. Unsafe is also still 'young' in that more tooling around it will still be worked on over the years/decades. How will we know if we're being restrictive on a feature if we forbid it?

5. Reddit is toxic. People on Reddit are toxic. People are toxic. We are toxic.

A good principle for us to follow when we type things on the internet is to ask "would I say everything this way to a person if I was standing next to him/her/them"?

Good luck Nikolay, I wish you the best, we have learnt a lot from you on what's possible in our little community.