The maintainer of the popular Rust web framework Actix has quit the project -- though he's backed off threats to make its code private and delete its repository, instead appointing a new maintainer. "Be a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task," he'd complained last week on GitHub. "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... "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.... Nowadays supporting actix project is not fun, and be[ing] part of rust community is not fun as well." The Register reports: Actix Web was developed by Nikolay Kim, who is also a senior software engineer at Microsoft, though the Actix project is not an official Microsoft project. Actix Web is based on Actix, a framework for Rust based on the Actor model, also developed by Kim. The web framework is important to the Rust community partly because it addresses a common use case (development web applications) and partly because of its outstanding performance. For some tests, Actix tops the Techempower benchmarks. The project is open source and while it is popular, there has been some unhappiness among users about its use of "unsafe" code... Safe code is protected from common bugs (and more importantly, security vulnerabilities) arising from issues like variables which point to uninitialized memory, or variables which are used after the memory allocated to them has been freed, or attempting to write data to a variable which exceeds the memory allocated. Code in Rust is safe by default, but the language also supports unsafe code, which can be useful for interoperability or to improve performance. There is extensive use of unsafe code in Actix, leading to debate about what should be fixed. Kim was not always receptive to proposed changes... Kim said that he did not ignore or delete issues arbitrarily, but only because he felt he had a better or more creative solution than the one proposed -- while also acknowledging that the "removing issue was a stupid idea." He also threatened to "make [Actix] repos private and then delete them...." Since then, matters have improved. The Github repository was restored and Kim said, "I realized, a lot of people depend on actix. And it would be unfair to just delete repos... I hope new community of developers emerge. And good luck!" The developer news site DevClass wrote that "The apparent 'ragequit' has prompted questions about the dynamics within the open source community." Over 120 GitHub users have now signed a sympathetic letter to Nikolay from "users, contributors, and followers of your work in the Rust community," saying "We are extremely disappointed at the level of abuse directed towards you." "Working on open source projects should be rewarding, and your work has empowered thousands of developers across the world to build web services with Rust. It's incredibly tragic for someone who has contributed so much to the community, to be made to feel so unwelcome that they feel that they have no other choice than to leave. This is not the kind of community we want."

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