Good read. I think we, as a species where never so exposed to so many "variants" of people, before the internet, we made contact with a few hundred maybe a thousand people in our life, and we didn't cross words with most of them, now we are realizing that some "variations" are more "visible" than others.
Sadly the bad experience of the Actix founder where because of 10 guys (somehow I can't picture a woman in that group, maybe is just my poor imagination) making him miserable, while thousands of us where happily enjoying and appreciating his job.
We had, in part, some of the fault, we didn't scream as loud as those 10 sad noisy and envious little people. We failed too, so accordingly we also pay for it. :(
What's most concerning to me is that under the anger there's a real, important discussion trying to get out. The soundness conversation matters when discussing the only 1.0-stable web framework in the entire ecosystem. I'd hope that as a community we can figure out how to actually have the discussion despite these loud few.
Oh yes, and it got muddied but the hatred. I don't know the reasons behind it but the fact that the whole load was taken by just 1 guy is a big part of the problem. Both, all the time before this event and now, even the Linux Kernel that is very Linus-centric have devs that could take charge as a head or as part of a head group, Actix apparently had no such group. I really think that this concerns the whole Rust community, after some lookout I found no real alternative, the closest would be plain Hyper which is much more barebone and Rocket that in all benchmarks doesn't do well (at all) and is still in 0.5 with nightly. Which is leaves Rust pretty much like 2-3 years ago. Even the wasm/rust is threaten because why use Rust for the front end if you can't use it in the backend too.
Even I'm wondering if I should move my Rust efforts back to Python or maybe Golang, which is very sad to me, because I really like Rust. But waiting god knows how long for Rocket to catch up or a couple of years for some other framework to get born and get stable.. tuff
I'm wondering if I should move my Rust efforts back to Python or maybe Golang
Be the change you wish to see, etc... one slip up does not undo all the progress the community has made, and I think anyone who's bitten the Rust apple believes in the technical merit of the language as a platform, just maybe not necessarily the ecosystem as it stands today. I'm not going anywhere.
but we'll have to see what happen with Actix, maybe someone else will take charge, but the fact is, if disappears I can't sit in my thumbs for who knows how long and sadly technically better doesn't make it viable (ask Haskell programmers).
My main interests in programming in general are embedded and webdev (mainly backend), to catch C in embedded Rust is years away and without Actix webdev seems to be also in the same situation.
But maybe all get sorted and this is a wake up call for the Actix founder to get more hands in the cooking, maybe get someone to deal with the community and him just code, which probably would make him happier (would make me happier).
Is hard to just leave your work of many years, I'm hoping his fingers get itchy. He released version 2 not long a go for Pete sake. Maybe some cold headed chillout put things in order and the blackout shuts the annoying haters and all of us start taking care of them in forums and github discussions.
Maybe this is just a necessary reset. Dramatic and terrifying but necessary.
Would be bad either if Mozilla or some other big dog pay some attention to Actix, because as I mentioned, the whole web backend is nowadays depending in 1 guy and is not a cold hard tuff almost inhuman Torvalds, that scolds Intel for their bugs or give the finger to Nvidia.
Meanwhile, it forced me to make some rework in a petproject tha have some coupled code, some layers mixed up that would make dificult to migrate from Actix to something else. :)
I've dabbled with Rust for a short while because I got involved in a project which used it on the backend - which later stalled, then failed, in large part because of the same sort of psychological/interpersonal issues which we're discussing here - headstrong, 'toxic' en self-centered people, prima donnas. I really had a deja vu feeling, different context, similar problems.
We used Rocket as that was apparently the 'standard' choice, I have no clue if it was good or bad but as far as I could see it worked.
I was (am) a total beginner in Rust but I liked the design and philosophy of the language a lot. It has a very well designed type system, it has a strong FP feel to it, and so on. Haskell but then less academic and more practical, that's how I see it. I don't see it as a better C since I'm not interested in C (or C++) at all :-)
After that I looked at Go and I was quite shocked at how incredibly simplistic the language is. What really sticks out like a sore thumb is the lack of generics in its type system, this means that any form of FP (functional programming) is almost impossible, as a result everything is coded imperatively with repetitive loops ad nauseam.
The good thing is of course its compiler which runs circles around Rust's (but then again the Go compiler doesn't do that much ...) but if Go didn't have its admittedly brilliant Goroutines then I wonder if people would care about it at all.
Sad to say that after that project which I mentioned went south there wasn't much motivation left for me to spend any more time on Rust.
Also a pity IMO if Rust gets framed too much as a "systems programming" language in the C/C++ corner, potentially it could be a very good web/network/backend development programming language as far as I could see.
exactly, that's why I think that Actix is so important, it's the proof that you can make higher level stuff with it; I haven't lost hope on a Actix comeback, if not by Nikolay by someone else. Is too much and to good work to be lost and the Rust ecosystem is small enough that this event will not pass unnoticed. I wouldn't take Actix for dead yet. Imagine how awesome and how fast could Actix grow with a "big" dog behind it, it hasn't even need to be that big, maybe even take Nikolay as head dev and put people to deal with community, minor patches, etc. In a Linus like situation. If him almost alone built Actix in a few years. We sometimes think webdev as just more complex websites, but is also tooling for monitoring, interfaces for embedded, enterprise systems, ERP are basically huge webapps. And with Rust as one of the main wasm PL having a fast and robust backend is vital and now we know it can be done and used even by chumps like me :) and even without a huge documentation like Django, the fact that I can use it just with the API docs is a credit to buth, Rust and Actix.
I'll take a second look to Rocket but the fact that is a 0.5x version and that only works with nightly kills me.
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Good read. I think we, as a species where never so exposed to so many "variants" of people, before the internet, we made contact with a few hundred maybe a thousand people in our life, and we didn't cross words with most of them, now we are realizing that some "variations" are more "visible" than others.
Sadly the bad experience of the Actix founder where because of 10 guys (somehow I can't picture a woman in that group, maybe is just my poor imagination) making him miserable, while thousands of us where happily enjoying and appreciating his job.
We had, in part, some of the fault, we didn't scream as loud as those 10 sad noisy and envious little people. We failed too, so accordingly we also pay for it. :(
What's most concerning to me is that under the anger there's a real, important discussion trying to get out. The soundness conversation matters when discussing the only 1.0-stable web framework in the entire ecosystem. I'd hope that as a community we can figure out how to actually have the discussion despite these loud few.
Oh yes, and it got muddied but the hatred. I don't know the reasons behind it but the fact that the whole load was taken by just 1 guy is a big part of the problem. Both, all the time before this event and now, even the Linux Kernel that is very Linus-centric have devs that could take charge as a head or as part of a head group, Actix apparently had no such group. I really think that this concerns the whole Rust community, after some lookout I found no real alternative, the closest would be plain Hyper which is much more barebone and Rocket that in all benchmarks doesn't do well (at all) and is still in 0.5 with nightly. Which is leaves Rust pretty much like 2-3 years ago. Even the wasm/rust is threaten because why use Rust for the front end if you can't use it in the backend too.
Even I'm wondering if I should move my Rust efforts back to Python or maybe Golang, which is very sad to me, because I really like Rust. But waiting god knows how long for Rocket to catch up or a couple of years for some other framework to get born and get stable.. tuff
Be the change you wish to see, etc... one slip up does not undo all the progress the community has made, and I think anyone who's bitten the Rust apple believes in the technical merit of the language as a platform, just maybe not necessarily the ecosystem as it stands today. I'm not going anywhere.
but we'll have to see what happen with Actix, maybe someone else will take charge, but the fact is, if disappears I can't sit in my thumbs for who knows how long and sadly technically better doesn't make it viable (ask Haskell programmers).
My main interests in programming in general are embedded and webdev (mainly backend), to catch C in embedded Rust is years away and without Actix webdev seems to be also in the same situation.
But maybe all get sorted and this is a wake up call for the Actix founder to get more hands in the cooking, maybe get someone to deal with the community and him just code, which probably would make him happier (would make me happier).
Is hard to just leave your work of many years, I'm hoping his fingers get itchy. He released version 2 not long a go for Pete sake. Maybe some cold headed chillout put things in order and the blackout shuts the annoying haters and all of us start taking care of them in forums and github discussions.
Maybe this is just a necessary reset. Dramatic and terrifying but necessary.
Would be bad either if Mozilla or some other big dog pay some attention to Actix, because as I mentioned, the whole web backend is nowadays depending in 1 guy and is not a cold hard tuff almost inhuman Torvalds, that scolds Intel for their bugs or give the finger to Nvidia.
Meanwhile, it forced me to make some rework in a petproject tha have some coupled code, some layers mixed up that would make dificult to migrate from Actix to something else. :)
I've dabbled with Rust for a short while because I got involved in a project which used it on the backend - which later stalled, then failed, in large part because of the same sort of psychological/interpersonal issues which we're discussing here - headstrong, 'toxic' en self-centered people, prima donnas. I really had a deja vu feeling, different context, similar problems.
We used Rocket as that was apparently the 'standard' choice, I have no clue if it was good or bad but as far as I could see it worked.
I was (am) a total beginner in Rust but I liked the design and philosophy of the language a lot. It has a very well designed type system, it has a strong FP feel to it, and so on. Haskell but then less academic and more practical, that's how I see it. I don't see it as a better C since I'm not interested in C (or C++) at all :-)
After that I looked at Go and I was quite shocked at how incredibly simplistic the language is. What really sticks out like a sore thumb is the lack of generics in its type system, this means that any form of FP (functional programming) is almost impossible, as a result everything is coded imperatively with repetitive loops ad nauseam.
The good thing is of course its compiler which runs circles around Rust's (but then again the Go compiler doesn't do that much ...) but if Go didn't have its admittedly brilliant Goroutines then I wonder if people would care about it at all.
Sad to say that after that project which I mentioned went south there wasn't much motivation left for me to spend any more time on Rust.
Also a pity IMO if Rust gets framed too much as a "systems programming" language in the C/C++ corner, potentially it could be a very good web/network/backend development programming language as far as I could see.
exactly, that's why I think that Actix is so important, it's the proof that you can make higher level stuff with it; I haven't lost hope on a Actix comeback, if not by Nikolay by someone else. Is too much and to good work to be lost and the Rust ecosystem is small enough that this event will not pass unnoticed. I wouldn't take Actix for dead yet. Imagine how awesome and how fast could Actix grow with a "big" dog behind it, it hasn't even need to be that big, maybe even take Nikolay as head dev and put people to deal with community, minor patches, etc. In a Linus like situation. If him almost alone built Actix in a few years. We sometimes think webdev as just more complex websites, but is also tooling for monitoring, interfaces for embedded, enterprise systems, ERP are basically huge webapps. And with Rust as one of the main wasm PL having a fast and robust backend is vital and now we know it can be done and used even by chumps like me :) and even without a huge documentation like Django, the fact that I can use it just with the API docs is a credit to buth, Rust and Actix.
I'll take a second look to Rocket but the fact that is a 0.5x version and that only works with nightly kills me.