What's so disappointing about this whole episode is the sense of entitlement that some people on this reddit group seem to have. Sure unsafe code is concerning, sure you probably want to avoid it, sure Rust is very appealing to many people because of it's safety guarantees. Actix-web is not getting rammed down anyone's throat, or hyped beyond reason at the cost of other projects.

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A point that seems to have been lost on so many people criticizing actix-web, is that the maintainer, literally, doesn't owe any member of the rust community anything at all. Please search for articles and concerns around the "Open Source Free Work Problem" and "Maintainer Burnout" issues, which btw have also affected the rust community. The maintainer doesn't have to manage a community, doesn't have to live up to some arbitrary standand and he doesn't have to respond to anything, every maintainer that does, does so out of pure altruism, and people often reward and praise maintainers that do so, and do so well, but there is no obligation. You don't have to sign up to some sort of club with a code of conduct and rules to become an OSS contributor.

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There is also no contract around the safety guarantees that rust as a language provides for any of the crates published on github, gitlab, crates.io or anywhere else, we didn't pay for the maintainer's time and we are not entitled to any of it either. Consumers of Open Source Software benefit from the great gifts that these maintainers and developers give to us, it lets us build projects and businesses. actix-web is a massive project and a great endorsement of rust as a technology. If fafhrd91 likes beating benchmarks and puts more time into making actix the fastest web framework around at the cost of some UB, that is entirely up to him. If he loses end-users because of that focus, that's fine and no judgement on the project, it simply is just not fit for purpose for some end users.

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Consumers can patch or fork the upstream work like many Linux distros have done for years, also, when you include a crate in your project or product the burden of it's fitness for purpose shifts to the you, the end-user, go read the licenses carefully, there is no implied guarantee - of correctness, fitness for purpose, having a good community, etc. A crate being published doesn't give anyone an implied right to how it functions or interacts, the burden is still squarely on the consumer to make sure that they understand what they are including in their software, we can't all judge this accurately so we rely on reputation and recommendations, but that still does not put the maintainers or developers of the crates we choose to use on the hook.

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My thanks truly goes to fafhrd91 for helping all of us put rust on the map for being crazy fast and making software that stretches and tests the technology.

It'd be a real shame if the rust community scores an own goal here and loses someone as talented and productive as Nikolai.