A person can be in a tough spot personally and then things seem to spiral out of control around them because that just cannot be 100% isolated from professional stuff or other spheres of life. It seems like this might have happened to Hector based on the post. We've all been there and that part is completely understandable.
> I get that some people might not have liked my Mastodon posts. Yes, I can be abrasive sometimes, and that is a fault I own up to. But this is simply not okay. I cannot work with people who form cliques behind the scenes and lie about their intentions. I cannot work with those who place blame on the messenger, instead of those who are truly toxic in the community.
The abrasiveness though is the reason people react that way. Not everyone is going to respond with "hey that was abrasive, that's not how we do things, here is a better way to phrase it". The majority will simply shut down or start forming cliques in the background. I can't completely blame them either. Here is Hector threatening to launch a shaming social media campaign on kernel devs:
"If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas."
That's not ok. Even if he feels he is right and they are wrong. People will create cliques and talk behind your back if you act that way. People will look on Rust community after this and say "Remember that time when _they_ where threatening kernel devs with social media drama?". It's not right but that's the perception that will last.
> People will look on Rust community after this and say "Remember that time when _they_ where threatening kernel devs with social media drama?". It's not right but that's the perception that will last.
Happened with actix, happened with serde, and now being threatened by kernel contributors. The perception seems at least somewhat based in reality.
There was plenty of indefensible behavior in the Actix debacle, but the reason it blew up was because the maintainer was genuinely wrong and was being a jerk on top of it. The sequence of events was:
1) Issue found by Shnatsel
2) Issue closed as harmless to users by fafhrd91
3) Issue proven harmful to users by Nemo157 and reopened by JohnTitor
4) Issue fixed and closed by fafhrd91
5) Issue proven unfixed and proposed new patch by Nemo157
6) New patch commented "this patch is boring" by fafhrd91
7) Issue is deleted
8) Fix is reversed by fafhrd91, issue still present
A maintainer that rejects a fix for an issue that was proven harmful to users on the basis that it was "boring" and then deletes the issue is a bad maintainer. Death threats and abuse were definitely not the right answer, but public criticism is not unreasonable in such a case. If it were just a hobby project and advertised as such then that would be one thing, but he plastered info about how it was used production by a bunch of big companies on the website. That is not how someone who calls their code "production-ready" acts.
I'm not sure what you're arguing. Are you saying that because the Actix maintainer was "a bad maintainer" that the community shouldn't be held accountable for harassing him?
Rust, which is a language I really enjoy, generates more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years.
> more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years.
It is unfortunately wrapped up in larger-scale outrage culture than just within tech/programming circles. Rust as a community is very gay and very trans:
To be clear I am 111% down for that as one of the Alphabet People myself lol. We just can't pretend like it isn't a factor.
Disclaimer: I realize these numbers are probably skewed high due to self-selection of people who are willing to take diversity surveys. The actual percentages are probably somewhat lower, but Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.
Personally I'd go with the "biggest worries graph" for an explanation as to why I avoid rust like the plague. If you have half of all respondents say that it's not used enough the corollary they seem to have derived is "let's force it everywhere so it does get used more". Meanwhile forth people are hacking away on building a gui in 300 bytes in a mailing list open since the 80s.
I know which of the two languages was easier and more pleasant to hire for - which should be impossible as I kept getting told no one uses forth.
“The majority of those who consider themselves a member of an underrepresented or marginalized group in technology identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or otherwise non-heterosexual. The second most selected option was neurodivergent at 46% followed by trans at 35%.”
Out of 14.5% of the respondents. I wouldn’t call that a very anything community.
You may be misreading these numbers. It’s effectively 7-8% of the respondents who identify as non-heterosexual, which seems roughly in line with the general population (e.g. [0]).
That is assuming everyone who is one of those groups first sees themselves as marginalized. imo it would've been better to not have that first question and just ask people which group they identify with.
That’s a fair point, though I would be surprised if it made a huge difference. The actual survey question was: “Do you consider yourself a member of a group that is underrepresented or marginalized in technology?” I would expect most members of a minority to consider themselves underrepresented just by virtue of being a minority. And as the choice of groups was explicitly given, I assume that the survey allowed to view the groups and then go back to answering the first question.
I'd expect that as well, but we can't really assume that.
Being a minority does not make you underrepresented. Underrepresented means there are fewer than you'd expect, given population-level numbers. In the Rust community it certainly seems true that trans people are overrepresented, though "marginalized" almost certainly still applies. The same goes for LGB, which again does not seem underrepresented in the tech community compared to society writ large, and I think many LGB people probably don't see themselves as "marginalized" in 2025, but I could be wrong.
> I would expect most members of a minority to consider themselves underrepresented just by virtue of being a minority.
I don't see why that would be the case.
And for tech in particular I'd say women (half the population) are underrepresented and LGBT (a definite minority) are not. Marginalization is a bit more complicated but similar.
> Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.
How can you know this? What other communities even have such surveys?
I would expect this to be similar in any language. Anecdotally, I see the % of gay/trans/neurodivergent to be much higher in the dev community than the general population, so the numbers don’t look strange to me.
Perhaps it’s more vocal or more visible, but that would require much more analysis to enquire about cause and effect.
> The actual percentages are probably somewhat lower, but Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.
This is complete nonsense. We (LGBT) folk are pretty much equally represented in all programming communities. It's just that Rust presents as a very socially activist community, with all the attendant drama and culture war nonsense, including falsely claiming some sort of imprimatur from the LGBT folk to represent them. Cliquey hyper-online gays != the LGBT community.
Fortran, Erlang/OTP, any stack you can think of, will have LGBT devs. Common Lisp has some kickass trans devs. It's not a proliferation of rainbow flag emojis and obnoxious puerile cancel-culture politics that makes one community be 'more' LGBT than another. I won't stand for this kind of erasure of LGBT folk who don't take their assigned place in the culture war barricades.
Rust is a very neat language, but the biggest single barrier to its adoption is the Rust community, and I won't have them hijacking my identity to pretend some moral title to their constant - and deeply unpopular - online brigading, bullying, etc.
Please enlighten me why is this even a question on a language survey. I take many languages survey when they show up and Rust is the only one asking this.
at best this is a case of correlation not causation. but also given that lgbt folks are fairly common in all programming communities, i have a hard time believing these two are related and this is not something more specific to rust's culture
It must be said that from an outsider's point a view, in quite a few aspects it very much sounds like a cult.
Get an HN article about C++, and you can be certain the comment section is going to deteriorate at some point into a religious war mentioning Rust. Get an article about Rust, and there is going to be drama in the comments.
As a programmer that could potential consider Rust, it is off-putting.
I get the opposite experience, never saw those comments chiming in Rust everytime another programming language is mentioned or pushing in to rewrite everything into Rust, but I get comments complaining about such invisible forces.
This has been my experience too. There were a couple of years (like 2016-2018) where I saw a handful of people pushing the RIIR line, but I've seen many more people for many more years complaining about how those RIIR people are everywhere. Any time there's an article on Phoronix that mentions Rust, the trolls come out in droves to whine about how toxic the Rust community is and how they make everything political, while the only people in those threads making anything political are the anti-Rust trolls themselves.
It’s like how people complain about Apple users. You see more threads complaining about how annoying those Apple fanboys are than you see actual Apple fanboys being annoying.
I mean... Every HN thread with Apple discussion is pretty annoying. It might not be annoying to you as an Apple user, but for many of us it's unbearable...
Get an article about Rust, and there’s going to be comments about how drama, zealous Rust is from people that never use Rust. Regardless of its content.
So yeah, typical internet houlier than thou reactions, I wouldn’t read much into them.
> Get an article about Rust, and there’s going to be comments about how drama, zealous Rust is from people that never use Rust.
Of course: You don't have to use Rust to see this very post here on HN, and quite a few other similar ones. Are you saying people just imagine there's a lot of drama around Rust, or what? (That TFA here or in other similar posts are all lies, or outright made-up?) Because to me -- who never use Rust -- it looks like a fact.
Which is a large contributing factor to why I probably never will, either.
You can also be certain when reading a Zig post you will see "Why would I use Zig over Rust?" or "Isn't Zig unsafe?"
They cant help but proselytize. Its like talking to my recent born again christian friend who cant help but steer every conversation to Christianity and reciting scripture. It's infuriating.
Though TBH it very much feels like the cult of OOP that rocked the 90's. And look where that paradigm is now ...
> Though TBH it very much feels like the cult of OOP that rocked the 90's. And look where that paradigm is now ...
It's alive and well. Sure, Java-style OOP might not be, but that's mainly because it was never sensible OOP to begin with.
A bit like "Agile is dead" and everybody hating "Agile". Sure, what they hate is what's been pushed as "Agile" for the last decade or more: ceremoniel-over-flexibility-Scrum, rigid sprints, "user story" as a synonym for "ticket", etc, etc.
Let's hope that it's just "Fauauxp" that, like Fauxgile, is about to be dead. ASAP.
There's something about Rust that draws Zealots (or draws out zealotry in people). It's not at Haskell's level, but there are several culty elements for the fanatics: secret knowledge, being 'chosen' or set aside from the ignorant plebians, and an unshakable belief in a form of rapture when the language will inevitably win when everyone realizes the superiority of monads/memory safety.
They have no moral or ethical foundation that's outside of themselves. When someone presents something that looks, sounds, and feels like morality, they latch on. Cults and gangs work in a similar manner, taking advantage of that which is lacking.
Try asking a Rust zealot to give three different real world examples where someone should pick C++ over Rust, they can't do it. The zealots are literally incapable of viewing anything other than Rust as divine.
Every experience I've have with Rust people has been negative and worthless, so I view Rust as a major red flag on resumes when hiring :)
Hang on there: the serde issue drama would’ve happened in any other ecosystem and doesn’t quite belong in this list, because it was about shoving a pre-compiled binary into the supply chain.
(The actix drama was stupid IMO and is fair to criticize the community over tho)
> "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas."
This is just an incredibly odd thing to say. It's so obviously out of line that it seems like someone's joking around.
The Rust community (generally-speaking) just can't see why people have a visceral reaction against them, independent of its technical qualities. In all my years, I've not seen anything like it.
Mightn't it just be that it's a newer technology, which newness has attracted a younger crowd, and this happens to be part of the younger culture right now, more broadly?
I started reading the article, having little background on kernel drama, and ended it thinking to myself, “Jesus, what did this poor guy do to deserve all this hate?”
Then I read the thread you linked and thought, “Oh. That.”
To be clear nobody deserves to be harassed or threatened, but Hector’s messages make it clear he is astoundingly good at making himself into a victim of injustice. When his messages mentioned “cancer” I immediately thought that meant another kernel dev told someone to get cancer or die of cancer or something, which would be completely unacceptable. He was using the word metaphorically to describe the way Rust is slowly making its way into the kernel, like a cancer growing.
How anyone (read: Hector) could think this requires CoC action is baffling to me. Insane language policing.
Is it possible to agree that having one’s work compared to cancer could be insulting but also that trying to publicly shame people about it isn’t the right response?
It seems at the heart of the issue is the vision for the future of Linux kernel.
One group believes it is Rust (progressives), one group doesn't believe that and wants to continue with C (conservatives).
If they cannot find a way to live at peace with each other, I think the only solution is for the Rust folks to start building the kernel in Rust and not try to "convert" the existing kernel to Rust piece by piece.
Why they cannot live in peace seems to be: a way that C kernel folks would not need to deal with Rust code.
At the core, the story is not that different from introducing new languages to a project.
You are introducing a new tax on everyone to pay for the new goodies you like, and those who are going to be taxed and don't like the new goodies are resisting.
Then entertain his question and tell us what is? Bringing up people’s attention to the matter to finally somehow resolve the situation is his last resort, after spending years trying to upstream even trivial patches. You can eat your cake and have it too - you can’t say you want rust in the kernel and then sabotage any upstreaming efforts
> Then entertain his question and tell us what is? Bringing up people’s attention to the matter to finally somehow resolve the situation is his last resort, after spending years trying to upstream even trivial patches.
When upstream won't work with you, the answer is to maintain a separate tree. Yes, it's a lot of work to maintain a separate tree. No, you won't get as much use if you're in a separate tree.
I don't think that they owe it to him, but I do think it's shitty to string people along for several years without merging their code, often refusing to even review their code, without giving any technical reasons and while behind the scenes straight-up conspiring to sabotage their efforts.
I mean, that's the kind of abusive dynamic I'd expect from a horrible corporation: stringing along underpaid or unpaid interns for several years and refusing to hire them at the end of it without giving any actual feedback.
> Then entertain his question and tell us what is?
In this particular case, Hector himself with the blog post hints at it, but a lot of damage has been done already: "I am working on personal issues currently, I'd like to step back for a while and will not be contributing. Thank you, all".
> Bringing up people’s attention to the matter to finally somehow resolve the situation
Not everything has a clear and fast resolution. I think Hector's team were hoping the resolution to be "Shut up everyone, we're doing Rust now, this is all merging in and that's that!". But it could have been "Shut up everyone, we're not doing Rust any longer". They would have been even more upset saying "this is a leadership failure, they're on the wrong side of history" and so on.
> you can’t say you want rust in the kernel and then sabotage any upstreaming efforts
Two wrongs don't make a right though. Call people out and ask them to explain their position, get others on your side. But threatening to drag their names all over Bluesky or X or Reddit or whatever latest thing is, is not productive, even more so it's anti-productive.
> Not everything has a clear and fast resolution. I think Hector's team were hoping the resolution to be "Shut up everyone, we're doing Rust now, this is all merging in and that's that.!". But it could have been "Shut up everyone, we're not doing Rust any longer". They would have been even more upset saying "this is a leadership failure, they're on the wrong side of history" and so on.
I'd argue that we're basically at the point where that _is_ what the de facto policy is, except without it being actually stated. There's a subsystem maintainer blocking any Rust code from being merged (even to be imported as a dependency from outside their subsystem) who said they will do "everything in their power" to stop Rust from being merged into any part of the kernel, and when people asked Linus to clarify whether he still thought it was viable to have Rust in the kernel, he said nothing. Hector made the infamous comment about social media, and _then_ Linus stepped in to say that we needed technical debate rather than social media brigading, which gives the not-so-great precedent that invoking social media was actually more effective at getting some sort of response than the technical debate that he actually said he wants. So now, the status quo is that someone with the power to completely block any progress towards actually including any amount of Rust in the kernel will presumably continue to do so, but Linus still is sticking to the line that we can have "technical debate" about it even though the outcome is predetermined to end in failure.
You're right that not everything has a clear and fast resolution, but given that the only possible ways for this to end other than just making the "no Rust in the kernel" policy explicit is either for Linus overrule the maintainer blocking any Rust code from being merged or every single patch containing any Rust code to be blocked, it seems pretty clear to me that the way things are now is just a slower, less clear version of the negative outcome, so having a clear and fast resolution with an undesired outcome would be far better. This seems like the real cause of frustration that Hector has; it's hard not to feel like the reasons for this path to "resolution" was picked over just admitting that it's essentially official policy that Rust isn't allowed for reasons that are ultimately purely social rather than technical. The correct resolution in my opinion would be if Linus said something like "regardless of my opinion on whether Rust should be allowed in the kernel, I'm not willing to overrule the decision of the subsystem maintainer in this case, so the current status quo will remain unless someone is able to convince people to merge things on their own". My best guess for why he didn't want to do that is that it would essentially paint a target on any maintainers refusing to merge Rust code, which is understandable but seems like it will just cause more frustration in the long run than simply ending acknowledging the reality of the current situation.
> which gives the not-so-great precedent that invoking social media was actually more effective at getting some sort of response than the technical debate that he actually said he wants. So now, the status quo is that someone with the power to completely block any progress towards actually including any amount of Rust in the kernel will presumably continue to do so, but Linus still is sticking to the line that we can have "technical debate" about it even though the outcome is predetermined to end in failure.
It's true but sort of assumes that Linus is an automaton, like a corporation: if you threaten with a social media drama, then he'll respond. The problem is that it feels he was forced to respond, and he didn't really like kernel devs being part of the social media drama. So he responded, so in a strange way, he emerged as the calm voice of reason. And it left a long unpleasant memory in the community regarding it.
> it will just cause more frustration in the long run than simply ending acknowledging the reality of the current situation.
Sadly, I think that's what will happen.
> I'd argue that we're basically at the point where that _is_ what the de facto policy is, except without it being actually stated.
It does seem that way, I agree with you, but I think this made it worse as you highlighted already. So it was an uphill road, but now the hill got steeper and taller. Another way this could have played out is Hector wrote a blog post saying "I am having personal issues, I am frustrated, I am stepping down". Let people figure out more details. But getting into a public spat with Linux devs was not productive for his and his team's goals. He hurt his team (Rust + Asahi) more than he helped in the end.
> I get that some people might not have liked my Mastodon posts. Yes, I can be abrasive sometimes, and that is a fault I own up to. But this is simply not okay. I cannot work with people who form cliques behind the scenes and lie about their intentions. I cannot work with those who place blame on the messenger, instead of those who are truly toxic in the community.
The abrasiveness though is the reason people react that way. Not everyone is going to respond with "hey that was abrasive, that's not how we do things, here is a better way to phrase it". The majority will simply shut down or start forming cliques in the background. I can't completely blame them either. Here is Hector threatening to launch a shaming social media campaign on kernel devs:
> https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/208e1fc3-cfc3-4a26-98...
"If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas."
That's not ok. Even if he feels he is right and they are wrong. People will create cliques and talk behind your back if you act that way. People will look on Rust community after this and say "Remember that time when _they_ where threatening kernel devs with social media drama?". It's not right but that's the perception that will last.