Sadly, the actix-web maintainer has quit. Check out the repo - it's gone. He moved it back to a personal account and may delete it entirely. He's not just done with actix-web, he's done with open-source. Way to go, team.

It's kinda like last time around. The underlying issue is a legitimate technical concern regarding soundness and unnecessary usage of unsafe in the library, which the maintainer does not perceive as problematic.

Enter Reddit, enter vitriol and toxicity. Real technical concerns, and an utter inability to discuss them like everyone involved is actually people. It's endlessly frustrating. I'd quit too, and now everyone loses.

Steve Klabnick says it better than I could. In his conclusion he observes: "The Rust community says they’re nice but they will harass you if you use unsafe wrong." Can we do better?

I don't know. What do we do about this? What can we do about this, what should we do about this? This is why we can't have nice things, but I really want some nice things. However you feel about soundness, this is a quality piece of software and a big loss for the Rust community and ecosystem.

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. Like the author says in his post-mortem:

It was fun trip but now is time to move on. Life should be fun.

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash