It is a mistake to marginalize what a small number of people achieved. An organized team successfully "cancelled" the Actix project and smeared its author after repeated attempts-- three distinct episodes over 12 months. This was a campaign that spanned social media and github.
It is worth noting that to this date, none of the members of the anti-actix effort have contributed towards a viable alternative, nor have they attempted to resolve their concerns in the actix ecosystem. It turns out that the patrons who complained about free beer never intended to brew their own.
I never followed the matter closely, but from the parts that I did follow or investigate, your comment doesn’t feel particularly accurate.
• I don’t believe there was any organised team; it arose organically.
• In each case the complaints were of concrete problems that incorrect usage of unsafe caused. After that, people did then tend to pile on and baulk at other unsafe code that was probably OK, because the author had been proven untrustworthy in using unsafe code. (“Unsafe” says “trust me, it’s OK”, and that trust had been broken.) And there were one or two people that made it more direct personal attacks—but probably only one or two.
• Your final paragraph just seems completely wrong. Various of those that complained did offer alternatives, some of which were turned down. And people did go with viable alternatives, switching to competitors to Actix. Even apart from all that, if you can prove that by some metric a piece of software is bad, why would the burden lie with you to fix it? (Especially if your patches are rejected.) If the problem won’t be fixed, recommending that others avoid it seems perfectly reasonable. You’re presenting a common logical fallacies, that you can’t criticise something unless you can provide an alternative. I don’t need to be able to build a better bridge to be able to point out that it’s falling down.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I intend to engage no further on this. The points have been hashed out before and there is nothing new to say; things just tend to get heated. Have an enjoyable day. :)
It is worth noting that to this date, none of the members of the anti-actix effort have contributed towards a viable alternative, nor have they attempted to resolve their concerns in the actix ecosystem. It turns out that the patrons who complained about free beer never intended to brew their own.