4 ms·

for anyone not following Rust, the drama around the (popular) Actix web framework was a prominent instance of this. iirc people opened issues and PRs re: the pr

• chrismorgan 6y ago
  By no means is it only about Actix; that’s just one of the more notable times that something like that has happened. The eminently reasonable criticism boils down to baulking at people undermining Rust’s safety guarantees with demonstrably wrong unsafe code, while publishing said code in such a way that you’re suggesting that others use it (i.e. it’s not just private code). It is also then often taken further to a general unease at gratuitous use of unsafe code, which I consider fairly reasonable because it’s so hard to get right (it’s unsafe for a reason). Then sometimes a few people take it beyond what might be considered socially reasonable.
  • uryga 6y ago
    > [Actix] is just one of the more notable times that something like that has happened. edited my comment to reflect this, thanks i was trying to keep my summary relatively opinion-free – the internet probably doesn't need my take on that situation :)
  • Dowwie 6y ago
    It is a mistake to marginalize what a small number of people achieved. An organized team successfully "cancelled" the Actix project and smeared its author after repeated attempts-- three distinct episodes over 12 months. This was a campaign that spanned social media and github. It is worth noting that to this date, none of the members of the anti-actix effort have contributed towards a viable alternative, nor have they attempted to resolve their concerns in the actix ecosystem. It turns out that the patrons who complained about free beer never intended to brew their own.
    • chrismorgan 6y ago
      I never followed the matter closely, but from the parts that I did follow or investigate, your comment doesn’t feel particularly accurate. • I don’t believe there was any organised team; it arose organically. • In each case the complaints were of concrete problems that incorrect usage of unsafe caused. After that, people did then tend to pile on and baulk at other unsafe code that was probably OK, because the author had been proven untrustworthy in using unsafe code. (“Unsafe” says “trust me, it’s OK”, and that trust had been broken.) And there were one or two people that made it more direct personal attacks—but probably only one or two. • Your final paragraph just seems completely wrong. Various of those that complained did offer alternatives, some of which were turned down. And people did go with viable alternatives, switching to competitors to Actix. Even apart from all that, if you can prove that by some metric a piece of software is bad, why would the burden lie with you to fix it? (Especially if your patches are rejected.) If the problem won’t be fixed, recommending that others avoid it seems perfectly reasonable. You’re presenting a common logical fallacies, that you can’t criticise something unless you can provide an alternative. I don’t need to be able to build a better bridge to be able to point out that it’s falling down. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I intend to engage no further on this. The points have been hashed out before and there is nothing new to say; things just tend to get heated. Have an enjoyable day. :)
      • Dowwie 6y ago
        Have a great weekend
• codeflo 6y ago
  For the most part, the Rust community seems to value safety and correctness above extracting the last bit of performance. Using “unsafe” code is seen as a necessary evil, only allowed when its use is hard to avoid, local and easy to understand. Mostly, you’re supposed to use unsafe code as the foundation which safer abstractions are built on top of. It’s a bit if an oversimplification to say that the Rust community complained about the amount of “unsafe” code in Actix. It was more about the how and why. From what I gather, the author didn’t accept patches that fixed safety/soundness bugs when they had even a small impact on performance. That’s a trade-off that one is allowed to make in my opinion (if clearly communicated, so that people can make informed decisions on whether to use a piece of code). I think this difference in values (or rather, engineering goals) explains in part why this escalated so badly. But a healthy software ecosystem should have room for libraries that make different trade-offs. Zealotry (in the form of “There’s one right way”) doesn’t encourage experimentation, and shrinks communities instead of growing them.
  • Dowwie 6y ago
    The soundness argument usually didn't carry water and was presented by people who were very much out of their depth (not that I was any more in-depth, but at least I stayed out of the way). The author and others addressed a lot of unnecessary unsafe, though. That which was left remained a sore point for those who demanded code purity. The author was a one-man army who took flak for way too long. Repeated requests to resolve non-issues blinded him to requests revealing actual concerns. It's analogous to the story of the boy who cried wolf. He was not respectful, but also had been fighting way too many battles for too long and consequently was all out of patience. It was a bad situation waiting to boil over.
• ssokolow 6y ago
  Since I haven't seen anyone cover it from quite this perspective, here's how I saw what led to things blowing up like that: What really got people riled up was that... 1. Nikolay refused to acknowledge the principle (stated in the rustonomicon, IIRC) that a function which can violate memory safety when fed incorrect arguments must be marked `unsafe`, EVEN IF IT'S AN INTERNAL-ONLY API. (Increasing the bus factor with regard to maintainability is core to how Rust competes with C++.) 2. The Actix website gave the strong impression that it was a production-ready dependency, rather than an experiment in squeezing out maximum performance, and, unless you'd been present for the previous stink-raisings, it did appear to be a mature, safe option for writing code in Rust that would then be exposed to the public Internet for an entire world of potential attackers to hammer on. 3. This was the third time Nikolay had done something like this. So, to some people, it felt like Nikolay was actively and callously developing a PR timebomb for Rust and its ecosystem. I won't rule on how they chose to act, but that's my take on why they chose to act.