Unsafe isn’t something you live without, you just avoid unless there’s a decent reason. Setting aside actix-web, the community has this really annoying obsession with not using unsafe anywhere. You’re not replacing decades of computing overnight, though, and it’s not the end of the world if it’s there sometimes.
It often feels like newcomers and zealots preaching the unsafe issue, too. I have to wonder if the Rust docs couldn’t better point out “the goal is less unsafes, but unsafes will exist - this is fine”. I know it kind of explains this already, but perhaps being more blunt?
Actix-web even with a few unsafe is still more sound than most frameworks IMO. I’ll take slightly better with crazy good performance over not better at all with no guarantees.
Also, look, the other problem is Reddit: I’m starting to think larger projects should squat their name there and redirect to better discussion places. I comment on Reddit sometimes and I roll my eyes every time I’ve done it lately.
I think the issue with Rust and unsafe is that people can't really handle and don't really want ambiguous shades of grey. Rust is harder to use than C or even C++, let's put that out there at the start. It expects a high degree of developer effort and skill, in return it gives memory safety without a garbage collector.
But if the Rust ecosystem has developed in such a way that most popular libraries don't actually give you guaranteed memory safety, then this quid-pro-quo breaks down. Now you're making a lot of effort to use the language and in return you get ... maybe sorta safety, some of the time? That's a rather difficult tradeoff to weigh up. How unsafe is the Rust ecosystem, really? As a Rust outsider I had thought it was used only very rarely and mostly in the standard library, by way of analogy to the Java ecosystem where that's the case. From this situation it sounds like it's widely used, and often for unclear reasons. So does using really Rust deliver the advertised benefits?
The fact this question even has to be asked is going to upset the Rust community because Rust is like most non-JVM languages, it has very poor interop with other codebases which makes it reliant on building a large community to be sustainable. The Rust community has to make Rust as attractive as possible for its own competitive survival. High profile libraries that undermine Rust's only value proposition is therefore a self-destructive trend. Actix Web gets great TechEmpower benchmarks, but at the cost of undermining that whole community's marketing pitch. Not surprisingly things get heated.
As for Reddit, I don't think that's the problem. Reddit is just threaded discussions with a large userbase. There are plenty of languages with active reddits and way less drama than Rust seems to have. Java, Kotlin, C++, Swift etc all have big subreddits and all have had zero community dramas that I remember in recent years. The issue is pretty clearly something related to Rust and its userbase. My guess is it's a combination of small size, lack of interop and the Mozilla leadership setting bad examples. There was a huge Rust drama a few years ago where they went ballistic and censored an entire discussion from Reddit because they appointed as their community manager a feminist ("kill all men" being one of her slogans) who had just finished creating a massive idpol drama in the NodeJS community, and not surprisingly the community didn't like it. That sort of immature move is something you don't see from more professionally managed languages.
You can't squat and redirect subreddits to external sites. I have personally been granted mod of a subreddit that had been redirecting to another website. Its against the rules and the subreddit will be banned at which point anyone can use /r/redditrequest to take it over.
Even if that did work however, people would create adjacent subreddits that would end up to be defacto sureddit, for example /r/competitiveoverwatch.
Unsafe isn’t something you live without, you just avoid unless there’s a decent reason. Setting aside actix-web, the community has this really annoying obsession with not using unsafe anywhere. You’re not replacing decades of computing overnight, though, and it’s not the end of the world if it’s there sometimes.
It often feels like newcomers and zealots preaching the unsafe issue, too. I have to wonder if the Rust docs couldn’t better point out “the goal is less unsafes, but unsafes will exist - this is fine”. I know it kind of explains this already, but perhaps being more blunt?
Actix-web even with a few unsafe is still more sound than most frameworks IMO. I’ll take slightly better with crazy good performance over not better at all with no guarantees.
Also, look, the other problem is Reddit: I’m starting to think larger projects should squat their name there and redirect to better discussion places. I comment on Reddit sometimes and I roll my eyes every time I’ve done it lately.
End rant, I guess.