I'm not sure I agree at all with the author about the air about the Rust community. Rust is an amazing language but the community has always been totalitarian trash. I try to keep as far away as possible from them as I can.
A Sad Day for Rust
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Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#732I am disgusted by the cultural phenomenon of making sarcastic call-out comments on twitter/etc., with an eye towards building up enough community outrage to force an issue. 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 so…
> read the fucking license > It sickens me > I am disgusted Almost sounds like you're... outraged? Perhaps trying to build up community outrage?
>no call to action
>not naming any individuals
>talking about a cultural phenomenon, not a specific incident
>no intent to force anyone to change
Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Rust seems to be being used most by people who are interested in blockchain and crypto. What makes you think that? I don't believe that is true, it's like saying C++ programmers are mostly interested in high frequency trading.
Well then who are these people?
It’s a general purpose programming language. I know people doing embedded bare metal development on ARM, people writing single page browser apps and others experimenting with replacing their C++ packet parser for VoIP telephony.
edit: typo
Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#734Tried 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?
The really short answer seems to be: actix was a Rust web framework. It did some things internally that some people didn't like. The Internet echo chamber picked that up and amplified it to a volume the maintainer couldn't justify working through. The Internet echo chamber is now going to pick this up and amplify it to a volume that probably isn't justified either. I think this is another story about the destructive…
That is actually an awesome explanation.
And absolutely correct in my view. I have been on the receiving end. I have friends who have been on the receiving end. It really is overwhelming to receive that 15,000% signal, nudged along by the dynamics of the rest of the tribe.
I really like that you found a way to cover this aspect.
Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#735Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a false equivalence, roller coasters have far more material risk given human lives are at stake.
If you had discovered Heartbleed, would you have kept that knowledge to yourself so that you could minimize the maintenance burden on the OpenSSL develoopers? Granted, no one died over Heartbleed but it caused lots of real people harm. We should start worrying about the well being of our fellow human beings long before their lives are at stake.
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Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might not be just reddit though. The author's summary points to a volatile combination of elements in Rust itself: 1) [T]he Rust project saw Rust as more than just the language... 2) unsafe... is a really important part of Rust, but also a very dangerous one, hence the name. If a project is considered to be not just a project, but something closer to a cause, people are going to defend their understanding of that…
> And introducing the language of "safe" and "unsafe" isn't just descriptive, it's a value judgment. `unsafe` is a PL term that refers to _soundness_. In Rust, an `unsafe { ... }` block is required to perform an `unsafe` operation, and it precisely means "The code in this block has been proven _sound_". If the code in the block turns out to be _unsound_, e.g., because the proof is incorrect, or non-existent, then the…
That's an interesting way too look at it. But that's not how it works in practice. Almost no one in industry is going to write proofs for their unsafe code. It didn't happen for C or C++ and it won't happen for Rust.
Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#737A lot of this thread has it wrong, and this wrongness contributes to the problem which led to this. I have two simple mantras which establish my philosophy here: 1. YOU are responsible for your dependencies. 2. Open source participants are volunteers and owe you nothing. It was never Nikolay's job to vet actix-web for you, nor did it become his job when the library became popular, nor does invoking "security" change…
> It was never Nikolay's job to vet actix-web for you, nor did it become his job when the library became popular, nor does invoking "security" change anything in the slightest. I don't think the anger is directed at there being security issues, the anger is directed at the fact that even when security vulnerabilities where found and patched, there was major pushback even getting those patches merged into the library.…
Rust is a programming language. Nothing more, nothing less. It is a tool. If I like the typing and macro systems used by Rust, but I do not care in the slightest about “memory safety” I can write my dirty, filthy ‘unsafe’ C style code with casts, and raw pointers, and multiple mutable references in a giant unsafe block and get a compiled binary out of rustc. And if I use the above style of coding to write a neat CLI tool and offer the code as open source on Github, so be it. What the purported ‘Rust community’ thinks the language professes doesn’t mean a thing. Use the tool or don’t.
I don’t want to come as negative toward Rust or developers using it, but there is a whole lot of using Rust’s ‘security’ focus/features to say the Actix developer needed to do things a certain way. He wrote he, he could do whatever the hell he wanted.
Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way is it correct or even helpful? Even if done tactfully, I have a hard time seeing that being taken by anyone as anything other than a personal attack. The correct response would be to organize the community to create a fork that is more focused on correctness and security than on performance.
It is correct and helpful because it can prevent continued poor behavior which impacts others. Trying to protect someone's feelings only goes so far. Sometimes you have to be straight and to the point with people whether they take it as a personal attack and it hurts their feelings or not. Whether it would be appropriate in this I case I don't know but I disagree that it is never the correct response.
This is just your opinion, and not a fact or some kind of social rule. In fact, I would say that using your logic, I can say that you should never ever express your opinion on such matters again, since you clearly don't know what you are talking about. Just giving it to you straight. My opinion is fact. Respect it! Do you see the irony?
Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#739How is this a story?
If people don't want to use an unsafe library, don't. If their patches aren't getting merged, clone it.
If reddit is being meany-heads, don't login.
I really don't understand what the point of this post is. It's arguable whether there's a problem, and if you take the author's point that this is a problem, no solution is offered.
Re: A Sad Day for Rust
#740A lot of this thread has it wrong, and this wrongness contributes to the problem which led to this. I have two simple mantras which establish my philosophy here: 1. YOU are responsible for your dependencies. 2. Open source participants are volunteers and owe you nothing. It was never Nikolay's job to vet actix-web for you, nor did it become his job when the library became popular, nor does invoking "security" change…
> Open source participants are volunteers and owe you nothing. I can't agree. Not for all participants. Let's take Linus. He's in charge of the Linux project, which thousands (millions?) of people contribute to every day. If Linus suddenly stopped merging any and all patches—but refused to officially step down—what do you think would happen? Oh, the project would more than survive—someone would fork it and that would…
I think there's a huge distinction you're missing here. As a volunteer teacher or facilitator, you've made a personal commitment to a group of individual people. I think there's a difference between that and sharing code with the faceless hordes of the internet. Personal interactions differ strongly online vs in person. It would be quite unusual for a large group of people to start screaming at you in person but this happens commonly on web forums etc., as was described in TFA.
If Linus is truly a volunteer, then he owes me and the rest of us nothing beyond what he's done already. I haven't sent him any money and have no relationship or agreement with him; he owes me nothing. The chaos will resolve itself and the world will go on.
In this case there's nothing to prevent someone else from forming the code and moving forward with it, until they also tire of the abuse this poor fellow experienced.