- Reaction score
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actix-web is dead.
This situation is bad, from all sides. When Rust was a tiny, tiny community, I thought to myself, “wow, I wonder how long this will last? Probably 1.0 will kill it.” Sort of playing off of Eternal September, I assumed that over time, the community would grow, and we’d encounter problems.
Today is the first day where I say to myself, okay, has that happened?
This story is not super clear-cut. I’m not going to link to a dozen citations, or try to prove that I’m some sort of neutral party here. I’m going to give you account of this story as I remember it and as I felt it. Because this isn’t really about playing judge. This is about thinking about the future.
It’s been very clear from the beginning that the Rust project saw Rust as more than just the language. The community and the people mattered. From the earliest days, leadership explicitly took the position that it wasn’t just the code, but the people around the project were important. Of course, people are also people, and so this wasn’t perfect; we’ve made several fairly large mis-steps here over the years. But Rust has been an experiment in community building as much as an experiment in language building. Can we reject the idea of a BDFL? Can we include as many people as possible? Can we be welcoming to folks who historically have not had great representation in open source? Can we reject contempt culture? Can we be inclusive of beginners?
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.
steveklabnik.com
This situation is bad, from all sides. When Rust was a tiny, tiny community, I thought to myself, “wow, I wonder how long this will last? Probably 1.0 will kill it.” Sort of playing off of Eternal September, I assumed that over time, the community would grow, and we’d encounter problems.
Today is the first day where I say to myself, okay, has that happened?
This story is not super clear-cut. I’m not going to link to a dozen citations, or try to prove that I’m some sort of neutral party here. I’m going to give you account of this story as I remember it and as I felt it. Because this isn’t really about playing judge. This is about thinking about the future.
It’s been very clear from the beginning that the Rust project saw Rust as more than just the language. The community and the people mattered. From the earliest days, leadership explicitly took the position that it wasn’t just the code, but the people around the project were important. Of course, people are also people, and so this wasn’t perfect; we’ve made several fairly large mis-steps here over the years. But Rust has been an experiment in community building as much as an experiment in language building. Can we reject the idea of a BDFL? Can we include as many people as possible? Can we be welcoming to folks who historically have not had great representation in open source? Can we reject contempt culture? Can we be inclusive of beginners?
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.
Steve Klabnik
steveklabnik.com
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