The "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" isn't actually a thing that exists. From my understanding the term was created as a self-deprecating meme by some Rust users to describe other Rust users. It's not a core policy and basically all serious Rust users don't do any of the alleged activities claimed to happen. They're too busy actually writing software.
Er, it's not a formal thing, but it's absolutely an emergent phenomenon that exists. Every single discussion on HN about either software vulnerabilities or C will have comments asserting that everything must be rewritten in rust. I would believe that it's not from "serious Rust users", but someone will show up to say it.
> The "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" isn't actually a thing that exists. (...) It's not a core policy and basically all serious Rust users don't do any of the alleged activities claimed to happen.
If that was remotely true how do you explain the Actix episode?
Some over zealous Redditors doing Redditor things. That's where it started anyway. There was no coordinated effort. Probably some people from 4chan as well.
> Some over zealous Redditors doing Redditor things.
Except that this was not a Reddit problem, was it? This was a problem created by the Rust community that showcases exactly the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" behavior we're talking here.
Would it made it a Mastodon problem if the Rust fundamentalists opted to use that to drive their relentless attacks? It wouldn't, would it?
I mean, it surely wasn't a GitHub problem when these Rust evangelists started harassing the maintainer through bug reports, which was the place where it all actually took place.
By "people threw a fit" you mean the Rust community put up a relentless harrasment campaign targeting the project author, even to the point where they involved their employer, and ultimately forced the maintainer to give up on FLOSS and abandoned the project altogether.
I mean I saw it on Reddit, guy got panned for abusing unsafe and bunch of unsafe were patched out. That's it as far as what I am aware of.
> Rust community put up a relentless harrasment campaign targeting
Don't judge community (especially one you don't know) by their worst member.
Rust community didn't all agree and made a pact to harass/dox that guy. Few assholes did.
Trying to generalize this behavior to entirety of Rust community is disingenuous. Imagine if I started saying all programmers were wife killers, because some programmers killed their wifes.
> Don't judge community (especially one you don't know) by their worst member.
The community was massively represented in that harassment campaign targeting Actix. We can still read the threads and the bug reports that fueled that shit show. Things got so bad that distinguished members of Rust's core team felt compelled to put on their PR hat to work on salvaging Rust's reputation and do limitation.
It was not bad apples. It was a hallmark of Rust's community.
I don't believe in collective guilt. If 10 or 20 or 200 assholes out of group of 30000 do something stupid, do you sentence the 30000 or the assholes, even if the rest of community has distanced from it? You are generalizing actions of a vocal few to the entire group.
Also, sure Rust people care overwhelmingly about Rust crates.
Any large enough community will statistically have some percent of "bad apples". You're arguing as if those bad apples are a majority. And not a statistical footnote.
> I don't believe in collective guilt. If 10 or 20 or 200 assholes out of group of 30000 do something stupid, do you sentence the 30000 or the assholes, even if the rest of community has distanced from it?
You mentioned Reddit. Rust's subreddit had at the time over 80k subscribers. The subreddit massively piled on the maintainer of Actix. This harassment campaign was so massive that core Rust members felt obligated to write public declarations how Rust should invest in community building and, with the Actix case as an example, whether they could actually reject contempt culture.
It was not an isolated bad apple. Rust's community is renowned for being toxic, hostile and abbrasive. This topic is underlined time and again even in HN. It's not possible to hide this fact.
I don't think people ending up on the wrong end of it particularly care if it's an actual organization or just an emergent "feature" of doing things in a space somewhat adjacent to Rust.
It was actually coined by the n-gate guy as a description of how some Hackernews descend upon a thread to advocate for Rust, typically proposing that something be rewritten in the language because muh memory safety.
The Rust community just picked it up. as self-deprecating humor.
