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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 neces

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.

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.