Comment by unclad5968
10 months ago
> People will look on Rust community after this and say "Remember that time when _they_ where threatening kernel devs with social media drama?". It's not right but that's the perception that will last.
Happened with actix, happened with serde, and now being threatened by kernel contributors. The perception seems at least somewhat based in reality.
There was plenty of indefensible behavior in the Actix debacle, but the reason it blew up was because the maintainer was genuinely wrong and was being a jerk on top of it. The sequence of events was:
1) Issue found by Shnatsel
2) Issue closed as harmless to users by fafhrd91
3) Issue proven harmful to users by Nemo157 and reopened by JohnTitor
4) Issue fixed and closed by fafhrd91
5) Issue proven unfixed and proposed new patch by Nemo157
6) New patch commented "this patch is boring" by fafhrd91
7) Issue is deleted
8) Fix is reversed by fafhrd91, issue still present
http://web.archive.org/web/20200116231317/https://github.com...
A maintainer that rejects a fix for an issue that was proven harmful to users on the basis that it was "boring" and then deletes the issue is a bad maintainer. Death threats and abuse were definitely not the right answer, but public criticism is not unreasonable in such a case. If it were just a hobby project and advertised as such then that would be one thing, but he plastered info about how it was used production by a bunch of big companies on the website. That is not how someone who calls their code "production-ready" acts.
I'm not sure what you're arguing. Are you saying that because the Actix maintainer was "a bad maintainer" that the community shouldn't be held accountable for harassing him?
This is explicitly not what they were saying. They explicitly wrote in their comment that you are replying to that this is not what they were saying.
Rust, which is a language I really enjoy, generates more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years.
> more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years.
It is unfortunately wrapped up in larger-scale outrage culture than just within tech/programming circles. Rust as a community is very gay and very trans:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Surve...
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Sur...
To be clear I am 111% down for that as one of the Alphabet People myself lol. We just can't pretend like it isn't a factor.
Disclaimer: I realize these numbers are probably skewed high due to self-selection of people who are willing to take diversity surveys. The actual percentages are probably somewhat lower, but Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.
Personally I'd go with the "biggest worries graph" for an explanation as to why I avoid rust like the plague. If you have half of all respondents say that it's not used enough the corollary they seem to have derived is "let's force it everywhere so it does get used more". Meanwhile forth people are hacking away on building a gui in 300 bytes in a mailing list open since the 80s.
I know which of the two languages was easier and more pleasant to hire for - which should be impossible as I kept getting told no one uses forth.
“The majority of those who consider themselves a member of an underrepresented or marginalized group in technology identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or otherwise non-heterosexual. The second most selected option was neurodivergent at 46% followed by trans at 35%.”
Out of 14.5% of the respondents. I wouldn’t call that a very anything community.
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You may be misreading these numbers. It’s effectively 7-8% of the respondents who identify as non-heterosexual, which seems roughly in line with the general population (e.g. [0]).
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270166/lgbt-identificat...
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Always enjoyed the meme that it's a syntax error without wearing stripey leggings and/or cat ears.
> Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.
How can you know this? What other communities even have such surveys?
I would expect this to be similar in any language. Anecdotally, I see the % of gay/trans/neurodivergent to be much higher in the dev community than the general population, so the numbers don’t look strange to me.
Perhaps it’s more vocal or more visible, but that would require much more analysis to enquire about cause and effect.
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> The actual percentages are probably somewhat lower, but Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.
This is complete nonsense. We (LGBT) folk are pretty much equally represented in all programming communities. It's just that Rust presents as a very socially activist community, with all the attendant drama and culture war nonsense, including falsely claiming some sort of imprimatur from the LGBT folk to represent them. Cliquey hyper-online gays != the LGBT community.
Fortran, Erlang/OTP, any stack you can think of, will have LGBT devs. Common Lisp has some kickass trans devs. It's not a proliferation of rainbow flag emojis and obnoxious puerile cancel-culture politics that makes one community be 'more' LGBT than another. I won't stand for this kind of erasure of LGBT folk who don't take their assigned place in the culture war barricades.
Rust is a very neat language, but the biggest single barrier to its adoption is the Rust community, and I won't have them hijacking my identity to pretend some moral title to their constant - and deeply unpopular - online brigading, bullying, etc.
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Please enlighten me why is this even a question on a language survey. I take many languages survey when they show up and Rust is the only one asking this.
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at best this is a case of correlation not causation. but also given that lgbt folks are fairly common in all programming communities, i have a hard time believing these two are related and this is not something more specific to rust's culture
It must be said that from an outsider's point a view, in quite a few aspects it very much sounds like a cult.
Get an HN article about C++, and you can be certain the comment section is going to deteriorate at some point into a religious war mentioning Rust. Get an article about Rust, and there is going to be drama in the comments.
As a programmer that could potential consider Rust, it is off-putting.
I get the opposite experience, never saw those comments chiming in Rust everytime another programming language is mentioned or pushing in to rewrite everything into Rust, but I get comments complaining about such invisible forces.
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Get an article about Rust, and there’s going to be comments about how drama, zealous Rust is from people that never use Rust. Regardless of its content.
So yeah, typical internet houlier than thou reactions, I wouldn’t read much into them.
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You can also be certain when reading a Zig post you will see "Why would I use Zig over Rust?" or "Isn't Zig unsafe?"
They cant help but proselytize. Its like talking to my recent born again christian friend who cant help but steer every conversation to Christianity and reciting scripture. It's infuriating.
Though TBH it very much feels like the cult of OOP that rocked the 90's. And look where that paradigm is now ...
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There's something about Rust that draws Zealots (or draws out zealotry in people). It's not at Haskell's level, but there are several culty elements for the fanatics: secret knowledge, being 'chosen' or set aside from the ignorant plebians, and an unshakable belief in a form of rapture when the language will inevitably win when everyone realizes the superiority of monads/memory safety.
They have no moral or ethical foundation that's outside of themselves. When someone presents something that looks, sounds, and feels like morality, they latch on. Cults and gangs work in a similar manner, taking advantage of that which is lacking.
Try asking a Rust zealot to give three different real world examples where someone should pick C++ over Rust, they can't do it. The zealots are literally incapable of viewing anything other than Rust as divine.
Every experience I've have with Rust people has been negative and worthless, so I view Rust as a major red flag on resumes when hiring :)
Hang on there: the serde issue drama would’ve happened in any other ecosystem and doesn’t quite belong in this list, because it was about shoving a pre-compiled binary into the supply chain.
(The actix drama was stupid IMO and is fair to criticize the community over tho)
Not true at all. Quite a few ecosystem communities are comfortable with having binary blobs sitting around, and wouldn’t cause any drama over that.
Should they be? Well…
> Should they be? Well…
You're so close to getting the point here. ;P
Never hire zealots who don't share your religion, they may be cheap - or free in this case - but in the long run they cost you a lot more.
Could you cite some references for actix and serde?