Actix project postmortem

Who?

Date: 01/17/2020

Why?

In a GitHub issue, creater Nikolay Kim explains why they were “done with open source.” Nikolay had been using unsafe Rust, which according to them had been intentional. They believed it’s usage was safe, and they had accounted for any possiblities of unsafe behavior. Unfortunately, their use of unsafe Rust resulted in what they described as “unsafe shitstorms” from the community.

Nikolay then went onto talk about the kind of toxicity that the community was coming from the community.

You alway face with rude and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do home work and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help.

And like a rock in a river, their desire to work was slowly weathering away from each and every one of these “unsafe shitstorms.”

You could notice after each unsafe shitstorm, i started to spend less and less time with the community. You felt betrayed after you put so much effort and then to hear all this shit comments, even if you understand that that is usual internet behavior.

Unfortunately, not only was their desire to work broken down slowly, but they felt like the project’s reputation was reaching a point of no return. (UB stands for undefined behavior)

But damage to the project’s reputation is done and I don’t think it is possible to recover. Actix always will be “shit full of UB” and “benchmark cheater”.

All of this led to them no longer enjoying being part of the community, nor did they enjoy supporting the project anymore either.

Nowadays supporting actix project is not fun, and be part of rust community is not fun as well.

Nikolay then said they were moving actix-net and actix-web project’s to their personal github page. They were thinking about making the repositiories private and then deleting them because, at the time, they couldn’t think of anyone who would be able to maintain the project properly.

P.S. I moved actix-net and actix-web project to my personal github account. I will make decision during next couple days what to do. I don’t want to see the project becomes ghost of what it was. Maintainers must understand how everything work, but don’t anyone who does and those who could are busy with other projects. At the moment I am planing to make repos private and then delete them (will remove benchmarks as well), unless others suggest better ideas.