alt Hacker NewsNice, I love WireGuard. I ended up building WrapGuard [1] to run applications without root access to the host and choose Go to write it in. I don't really know Rust, but does it make more sense for firmware/networking type software? Is there even a difference?
Replies
Pick the devil you know, as they say.
from TFA, the main advantage would be for embedded (as a library) use case, FFI with Go is harder.
Very cool. I may use this, but also curious what the best choice would be if you don't need encryption. I'm specifically wanting to enable some local container networking using apple's new container tool [1]. I know I could just use Docker...
One usecase I've always wanted is being able to combine multiple tunnels into one shared connection, for instance airVPN allows 5 simultaneous users per sub, it would be awesome if I could run 5x connections and combine their traffic, but I dunno how I would do this with wg / nmcli
Very cool project. Is it always an LD_PRELOAD or can it function as a standalone SOCKS proxy similar to wireproxy?
I believe you are making use of gVisor’s userspace TCP implementation. I’m not sure if there is something similar in Rust that would be so easy to set up like this.
I've implemented a few protocols in rust (and plenty in go and other languages).
One thing others haven't mentioned that I like rust for in this space:
The typestate pattern makes it really nice to work with protocols that have state. You encode your state machine logic into types, and your transitions into methods with move semantics, and you have a nice way to make sure your higher level code is using your protocol library correctly.
Another nice thing is that you can keep the number of copies and allocations way down if you're careful about how you use your buffers.
> firmware
Yes, lots of firmware runs on hardware where a GC doesn't make sense. Because of limited memory and performance constraints. Sometimes having predictable timings (i.e. not a GC with pauses) is nice. I believe compiler and library support is also just better for many embedded platforms in rust.
> networking type software
Rust is a much more aggressively optimizing compiler, and thus will typically be faster, in the places where that matters. GC pauses might also be a point against golang in some places here. Rust's idioms provide slightly less opportunity for bugs in places where reliability matters (e.g. having a type system that requires you check for errors instead of just patterns that encourage it).
So there's a difference, but generally go is a good enough language for networking software and it would be rare that I wouldn't suggest that "use what you know" is more important than the differences between the languages for non-firmware network software.