Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty (2020)
&gt; So, here we are in 2020, and nix#864 remains unmerged. Fred, you say, you overreact.<p>I read the entire PR. I _want_ to agree with the author, but I didn&#x27;t find this reasonable. The feedback, for the most part, was not about being perfectionism. Not remotely. It&#x27;s about being <i>correct</i>.<p>This is not unique to Rust, which as a language spends a lot of time being correct in a few dimensions, but pretty traditional. You can&#x27;t just call library functions from a multi-threaded context without understanding if they&#x27;re thread safe or not, if they&#x27;re reentrant, without using appropriate buffers or handling errno correctly.<p>Well, you <i>can</i>, of course. But then you have bugs, and crashes, and race conditions.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to come off harsh but this is pretty bog standard stuff. Maybe the author is new to all of this, maybe not, but complaining about <i>perfectionism</i> when the issues being raised are almost entirely <i>real actual issues</i> really rubs me the wrong way.<p>Take a look on LKML, or Git&#x27;s mailing list, or on any serious project from the last 20 years. The barrier to entry isn&#x27;t mailing lists, or Torvalds, or <i>perfectionism</i> or gatekeeping. The fact is that <i>most</i> programmers do not have the patience, skill or experience to write half-decent code that isn&#x27;t bug-ridden garbage. I don&#x27;t think <i>any</i> project maintainer <i>ever</i> wants to accept contributions that make their life harder.