Could you elaborate on those points, I'm genuinely curious? So far, I have found the Rust community to be immensely helpful, much more so than I experienced the C++ community. Granted, that's quite some time ago and might be at least partially caused by me asking fewer downright idiotic questions. But still, I'm interested in hearing about your experiences.
Rust libraries tend to over abstract and then need large refactors when those abstractions fall apart. When I’ve complained about it in the past I’ve been met with “You would need the abstraction eventually”. Maybe, but I’m also capable of building it myself it it gets to that.
Maybe that’s more of a bias with rust media stuff, seems to be going deeper into that rabbit hole though.
The community was at least, may still be, very sensitive to rust being criticised. I genuinely brought an example of a provably correct piece of code that the borrow checker wouldn’t accept, interior mutability problem. I was I should build a massive abstraction to avoid the problem and that I’m holding it wrong… Put me off the language for a few years, it shouldn’t have, I should have just ignored the people and continued on but we all get older and learn things.
I think there's a bit of mismanaged expectations, combined with a community that, while generally helpful, suffers from a bit of fatigue from constantly dispelling myths and falsehoods about the language, often presented in bad faith.
My favorite is when Rust gets dragged into weird American "culture wars" - somehow, it's a "woke" language? (And somehow, that's a problem?)
But yeah, the language docs are pretty up front about the fact that the borrow checker sometimes rejects code that is provably fine, so it's a weird criticism. The nontrivial breakthrough was that Rust proved that a huge amount of nontrivial code can be written within the restrictions of the borrow checker, eliminating swaths of risk factors without a resource penalty.
The Rust community is helpful... but also quite political and extremely hostile to anyone who doesn't share those politics. Even something as anodyne as saying "let's keep politics out of technical discussion" is frequently met with hostility (because many community members believe that tech is inherently political and that trying to keep politics out is really just a bad faith attempt to frame things in terms of the requester's preferred politics). It's also full of drama in a way that other communities online simply aren't. For example, the drama that happened when the guy behind thephd.dev got invited to give the keynote at rustconf, then his talk was downgraded from the keynote - everyone involved in that mess (including other bloggers who weighed in) came off as immature and not someone you would ever want to work with.
I like the Rust language quite a bit. I find the Rust community to be one of the most toxic places in the entire tech business. Your mileage may vary and that's fine of course - but plenty of people want to stay far away from a community that acts like the Rust community does.
To be clear, everyone in Rust community (on Reddit, Twitter, etc) was shocked by this, and people started asking for explanations. This led to several people stepping down, and seems to have been miscommunication between Rust Foundation and Rust Project.
I'd like to read the other sides of the story; do you have any recommendations?
On the surface it sounds like a community with such deep pathology that it will take at least a generation following a complete change of leadership to have a chance at recovery. But there are three sides to every story.
> On the surface it sounds like a community with such deep pathology
First what sort of pathology? You're confusing community with leadership.
The community didn't want this, and leadership was doing a restructuring due to change from Foundation and Project. Welcome to OSS projects.
Second as opposed to what?
A community at the beck and call of your CEO dictator? I'm a Java dev, so all it takes for Java to die is for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison to decide that they (ORACLE) are inserting two mandatory ads to be watched during each Java compiler run. Or god forbid that they will monetize Java.
Plus if I had 24/7 insight into how Oracle worked, I'd probably also be much less inclined to join Java as a new dev.
To paraphrase Tolstoy: (All perfect languages are dead;) Each imperfect language is imperfect in its own way.
I can try to answer your questions if they are important to you, but it will require some significant effort, so I'd like to be sure they aren't rhetorical first.
Honestly, I'm wondering what kind of pathology do you see that isn't just a community stereotype, and that won't change with the influx of new programmers?
And how does it differ from the average Open-Source Project?
The particular kind of pathology I see here is a strong centralization of the Rust community under the control of an unaccountable leadership caste. The point of free-software licensing is to minimize the control "owners" of software have over their users, protecting those users from abuses by leaders. Somehow Rust users seem to have, to a significant extent, abdicated the rights guaranteed to them by the software license.
For example, in your example of "inserting two mandatory ads to be watched during each Java compiler run", the OpenJDK license guarantees your right to remove those ads from your copy of javac, and to redistribute that copy of javac as the official Debian or Ubuntu version of javac. F-Droid does this routinely to such "antifeatures" in open-source Android applications, and of course Android itself exists because the open-source licenses of projects like Harmony, IDEA, and Eclipse protect Google from such malfeasance.
I'm not sure what the "average open-source project" is. Maybe something like https://github.com/justinasr/FantilatorOS/, the firmware for a redundant array of 64 inexpensive muffin fans that someone set up at CERN? https://web.archive.org/web/20231010215437/https://onlyfans.... Or https://github.com/antimatter15/splat, a Gaussian splat renderer in WebGL? I think those are both "non-average" in that they have a very above-average number of forks and stars. But, like the overwhelming majority of open-source projects, neither of them has a community in any meaningful sense, so I think the question doesn't make sense, given that it's a question about community dynamics.
For where I am concerned, I don't want to have anything to do with the kind of developers that still think that it's acceptable to use Github, VS Code, or Discord in 2025 in a professional setting, much worse teach a new generation of developers to use them : that's like being a doctor and giving out cigarettes to children.
