alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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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.
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.
>better portability across operating systems
Does Rust have better portability than C?
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.