Comment by testdelacc1
2 days ago
This isn’t a recent decision, which the title implies. This rewrite started in 2020, and they released Arti 1.0 in 2022. Check out the release post (https://blog.torproject.org/arti_100_released/) where they explain their rationale for the rewrite. They were unhappy with the state of the C codebase and couldn’t see a way to slowly refactor it. Their experience with Rust was positive for all the commonly cited reasons - if it compiles it works, good ecosystem leading to development velocity, better portability across operating systems, and attracting more contributors. They did say they weren’t happy at the time with binary sizes.
The change log in the arti repo (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/blob/main/CHAN...) shows a lot of recent development too- versions 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8 were released in the last 3 months and they talk about setting the foundations for larger features to come. All in all it seems like the decision worked out for the team.
Arti is also designed to be embedded as a library in other apps, so messaging clients (for example) will be able to leverage the network without needing a correctly configured Tor daemon on the host.
The extra safety in the code base is nice, but this seems like a bigger deal.
Yes, this is a complete exaggeration of a headline and should be flagged for that alone.
This has been a long running project, and the Tor team clearly took their time to make it, as opposed to being a spur-of-the-moment change.
You're reading way to much into the title. "[...] is switching to [...]" does not have any implication of being a "spur-of-the-moment" thing
>better portability across operating systems
Does Rust have better portability than C?
As the link I posted says
> Portability has been far easier than C, though sometimes we're forced to deal with differences between operating systems. (For example, when we've had to get into the fine details of filesystem permissions, we've found that most everything we do takes different handling on Windows.)
Remember, we’re not talking about the language. We’re talking about the stdlib and the surrounding ecosystem. The Rust stdlib and third party libraries generally handle windows well, so the Tor developers don’t need to special case windows.
It might have better abstractions over the current popular operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux). Obviously not more portable in general.
Depends on what C code you are talking about.
Doubtful. I can't even get Rust to work here on my slightly older Mac system. So with TOR switching away from a well supported language like C it's simple another project lost to me (unlikely you can stick with an older version for long in this case as they regularly break backwards compatibility in their network.)
> I can't even get Rust to work here on my slightly older Mac system.
Could you elaborate on that? macOS Sierra (released on 2016) on Intel macs is supported[1][2], which should allow for Macs from late 2009 onward to work. The Intel Mac build is no longer Tier 1 because the project no longer has access to CI machines for them, and 32-bit cross building is hampered by Xcode 14 not shipping the corresponding SDK[3].
1: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/556
2: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support/app...
3: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/118083
Thanks! This is a much better link than the OP, and better preempts the usual round of "why not my other pet language X instead"? questions. Clearly this choice and strategy has been in the works for a long time and the team has carefully thought out all options.