If you ask me, "Which programming language do you like the most?", I would hesitate to say Rust. In my opinion, she has a bright future. But the reality seems to be heading in another direction...
Image from Crab-lang
Beginning#
Rust has a short history. It was born in 2006 as Graydon Hoare's personal project. After Graydon Hoare became an employee of Mozilla in 2009, Mozilla started sponsoring the project. In the early stages of the language's development, the Servo browser layout engine was developed. After much effort, Rust finally released version 1.0 in 2015. Since then, Rust has spread rapidly within the community. It has been voted the most loved programming language for five consecutive years. Rust is mostly supported by the community, with most of its source code coming from community contributions. This emerging open-source programming language seems to have a bright future, and countless people are pursuing it. Tomorrow seems to be foreseeable...
But the good times don't seem to come so quickly.
Open Source Community Projects#
Rust is a community-based project. Most of Rust's code comes from the community, and Rust's ecosystem comes from the community. Almost everything about Rust is based on its large and vibrant community.
The open-source community is an inclusive place, perhaps the purest and most original tag of the Internet: "sharing." In the open-source community, whether you are LGBT or Russian, as long as you do not intentionally provoke conflicts that affect open-source projects and the open-source community, everyone is a family. At least most open-source communities are like this because this is the essence of open source, isn't it? Everyone can contribute, enjoy, communicate, and share happily. It is like an internet utopia.
Rust is an open-source project, a globally influential open-source project, a project built by developers from all over the world, and a project that belongs to everyone.
But there are always some people who want to use open-source projects to promote their political or ideological beliefs.
This kind of thinking is simply unreasonable, a perversion tainted with dictatorship. If a community agrees with a certain proposition, for example, if there is an open-source forum for LGBTQ+ programmers, naturally, even if this forum is open-source, but this project itself is created for this purpose, and this community is formed because of this, everyone thinks there is no problem with this. Naturally, it is okay to promote LGBTQ+ in this project. This is the freedom right of each of us. But if a project team ignores the opposition of the forum and blindly joins controversial things that do not belong to this project, and propagates that this open-source project that clearly belongs to the community must now obey the arrangement and be obedient, what would everyone think?
Unfortunately, this is the current situation in the Rust community.
The Happy House of Witnesses Wearing the Cloak of Open Source#
This is my evaluation of the Rust development team. Countless things have proven that the Rust development team almost completely ignores the voice of the community, pretends not to see countless controversies, and acts arbitrarily just to make themselves comfortable.
Why represent me????#
This is the earliest thing I know. In 2020, when Rust 1.44.0 was released, the official Rust blog strangely added two sentences:
This is a shorter blog post than usual: in acknowledgement that taking a stand against the police brutality currently happening in the US and the world at large is more important than sharing tech knowledge, we decided to significantly scale back the amount of promotion we're doing for this release.
The Rust Core Team believes that tech is and always will be political, and we encourage everyone take the time today to learn about racial inequality and support the Black Lives Matter movement.
The general meaning is: The Rust Core Team believes that technology is always political, and the team supports the Black Lives Matter movement. The racial discrimination by the US police is outrageous, and the core team hopes that everyone can pay attention to racial discrimination.
At that time, the Floyd incident was happening, and what the Rust core team said was not wrong. It is absolutely correct to eliminate racial discrimination.
But why should an open-source project get involved in politics? I also oppose racial discrimination, but what does it have to do with the project? Does it mean that the Rust community is composed entirely of people of color who support the Black Lives Matter movement? Why is an open-source project always political? Did the contributors in the community agree? Why were the contributors "represented"?
Obviously, the community contributors did not agree with this matter, and the team should represent the will of the community. So everyone argued fiercely in the comment section.
But who remembers where this is? This is the open-source community, a place without opposition, a pure technical open-source community, a pure land where even mutually hostile countries can chat happily.
Now, it has become the happy house of witnesses.
Why does the core team represent the community developers? Why do they voice their opinions on the hard work of everyone?
This is just one of the incidents, and there are many more.
Dictatorship and Bureaucracy? In a World-Class Open Source Project???#
On November 22, 2021, the Rust moderation team announced their resignation on GitHub. The reason for their collective resignation was: "Protesting against the Rust core team's failure to adhere to community guidelines and their irresponsibility towards everyone."
The Rust core team responded, but they did not respond to whether there was a real problem. They only released a fancy list and formed a new team to replace the original moderation team.
There was a long discussion about this matter on the forum, and Dragdu, who had been involved in the Rust open-source project for six years, wrote an article expressing his views. In summary, he said: Rust is currently a mess, with chaotic team management and excessive power in the core team. Just as the title says, "The Rust Core Team is Toxic."
The article details the author's personal experiences in the Rust team, and in the end, he states: I will call for the resignation of the core team members and the dissolution of the entire core team. I would question the core team members (despite the environment, they continue to create and develop amazing innovative work) whether this is a leadership that you think will act in your best interest and support you when you need it? Would you call this behavior the "core" of Rust? I wouldn't.
This is obviously not the way a core team of such a huge open-source project should be. If such a team is used in a small project, it is destined to fail. Rust, this big project, seems to have become a huge umbrella. Can you still touch the core team?
Is it an Open Source Project or a Political Hodgepodge?#
Fast forward to July 12, 2022, the Rust core team released a blog post, stating that members Aidan Hobson Sayers and Ashley Williams will be leaving the core team.
Ashley Williams became the center of the whirlpool. The blog introduces her as:
- Ashley Williams became a member of the core team in 2018 and has had an impact on many parts of the project. From leading community teams to establishing PagerDuty for infrastructure and Crates.io, to the Wasm working group, and to increasing Rust's influence and Rustbridge.
What is the reason for her departure? Let's rewind a bit to the year when the moderation team resigned, 2021.
Andrew Gallant pointed out that the moderation team was completely against the core team, and it had nothing to do with not following the rules. This matter sparked widespread discussion in the community, with some pointing out that Ashley Williams, a member of the core team, used the code of conduct as a "weapon" to "deal with" male contributors but did not follow it herself. The male pride and arrogance of the Rust core team, their unwillingness to promote Rust's development, has become an annoying and useless bureaucracy. The three male members of the Rust moderation team did not want to associate with such people and chose to resign.
You may ask, how was this matter resolved in the end? Obviously, Ashley Williams resigned. In the community, the administrators deleted all discussion threads related to this matter, stating that such non-constructive discussions would only disrupt the community.
But no matter what, Ashley Williams, the "unpopular person," finally left.
What labels are associated with Ashley Williams? Obviously, an extreme feminist (note: I don't dislike feminism, I support the modern feminist movement. If you think privilege is feminism, my advice is to learn history and not get expelled from your alma mater). As for how the Rust core team tolerated such a person who argued with them every day, it is also a funny question worth thinking about.
Joy#
Now, after reading everything, what do you think about the future of Rust? As a Rust developer, I naturally hope that Rust will get better and better, but the Rust team seems to be getting worse and worse. There are many small things that I have omitted in this article, such as the debate over the complexity of the official website and the mind-boggling work of the Rust Foundation. I just find it funny. The open-source community hasn't had a project that provides daily entertainment for a long time. To be honest, it is not easy for it to persist until now.
I am not pessimistic about the future of Rust. I believe that the open-source community can save everything. No one wants their beloved things to gradually disappear. In fact, some people in the Rust community have forked a new language similar to Rust, with almost the only difference being that it truly belongs to the open-source community.
Tomorrow will be better