Herb Sutter on increasing safety in C++

Yeah. Because they didn't themselves adhere to the rules they were supposed to enforce and there was no open discussion about literally any aspect of their job.

In other words, "inquisition" is more-or-less the exact opposite of what happened (continues to happen) in Rust … right?

This feels more like a stretched analogy than an attempt to genuinely advocate for community organisations that are equivalent to the Inquisition - the dichotomy between evangelists and inquisitors makes a certain amount of sense, but it's not necessarily the best way of describing the concept.

I'm surprised that I haven't seen the paradox of tolerance mentioned yet - that's always seemed the most apt way of thinking about this kind of thing. A community that wants to maintain tolerant norms /has/ to be intolerant of intolerance, or the intolerance it tolerates will eventually destroy it; tongue twister aside, the same logic will apply to tolerance of certain other kinds of community norms. For a language community that's focused so heavily on safety, both in the language design /and/ the community norms, I'd argue it's entirely reasonable for the community to be intolerant when it comes to flagrant breaches of those norms - accepting those breaches, particularly in a well-known and widely used low-level library, would present a real danger of destroying the norms entirely.