Mar 05 2025

A while back, I wrote A sad day for Rust about the Actix-web unsafe controversy. The short of it was, Actix-web was using some unsound unsafe code. When this was discovered, people responded pretty harshly, and the maintainer quit. Others picked up the work, but it still wasn’t great:

I’m not sure where we go from here, and I’m not sure what we could have done to prevent this from happening. But I feel like this is a failure, and it’s set Rust back a bit, and I’m just plain sad.

While the Rust community surely isn’t perfect, today I’d like to share with you a different story: one where there was some controvery, but it was handled in the complete opposite way.

Rustup is the official installer and toolchain manager for Rust. It has a much smaller team than Rust itself does, and releases on a much slower schedule.

Back in August of last year, it was decided to change some behavior. The details aren’t super important, what matters is that it’s a breaking change to a critical component of the ecosystem. I’m not here to say if this change is good or bad; they had good motivations, there’s also good reasons to keep the previous behavior, it’s one of those classic “you can’t make everyone happy” sort of deals.

The team knew that they’d need to let people know that this had happened:

Yes, you’ve understood it correctly, and this breakage is intentional: #3635 (comment)

Before the actual release, we’ll definitely clearly communicate this change with the community, and we’ll use the beta phase to collect user feedback.

And they did make a post on internals about the change, seeking feedback. This also landed in a This Week in Rust, in my understanding.

The problem is, not everyone reads internals, and not everyone reads This Week in Rust. And so yesterday, some folks woke up to a broken CI, leading to this bug report among other upset posts elsewhere on the internet.

I have been on the other side of this before. It’s frustrating when you try and communicate something, and people don’t hear about it, and then they find out later and get mad at you about it. I also remember the Actix debacle, and many other controversies in the broader open source ecosystem.

However, this time, things went differently. As you can see, the issue is very respectful, and the comments are also generally respectful. The team responded graciously, and decided to put in the work to release a new version to restore the previous behavior.

I was kind of worried yesterday that this would end up being another Actix situation. The Rust community has changed a lot over time, and while it’s still pretty good overall, sometimes things can go poorly, just like with any random group of thousands of people on the internet. But today, I’m grateful that feedback was given constructively, it was taken with the spirit that it was intended, and everyone should end up happy.

If only every controversy went this way, maybe I wouldn’t be wondering about coyotes.

Here’s my post about this post on BlueSky: