Rust adoption in privacy tooling always feels like watching an old fortress quietly replace its wooden beams with steel ones. Tor’s codebase has carried decades of security assumptions, C-era tradeoffs and performance scars, so a gradual Rustification seems like the most sensible way to buy safety without breaking the ecosystem. The real win isn’t “rewrite everything” but reducing the surface area where memory-unsafety bugs can even exist. If the team can shift the high-risk subsystems (parsing, crypto glue, protocol edges) into Rust while keeping well-tested C where it’s stable, Tor ends up with a sturdier core without a multi-year rewrite freeze. The interesting question is how far they’ll push it: Will future pluggable transports be Rust-first? Will relay operators eventually run a hybrid runtime? Or does this turn into a long coexistence phase like Firefox? Either way, a safer Tor is a good Tor.