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The Tor Project is switching to Rust

(itsfoss.com)
348 points giuliomagnifico | 2 comments | 12 Dec 25 12:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.428s | source
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jjgreen ◴[12 Dec 25 12:59 UTC] No.46243706[source]▶
Complete rewrites are always a bad idea ... [mutters of agreement] ... except in Rust! [cheering]
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lynndotpy ◴[12 Dec 25 13:26 UTC] No.46243912[source]▶
Complete rewrites have been done before. They're not impossible tasks. C to C++ (like with fish), C++ to Rust (fish again, Tor, etc), Java to C# (something I've seen), C# to C++ (evernote), Blender Game Engine to Godot (many small cases), Godot to Lumberyard (something I've seen), Unity to Godot (many small cases), etc. And there are all the myriad rewrites within the same language, or across major breaking changes (like Python 2 to Python 3).

I think "you should never do a full rewrite" is something of a reactionary response to the juvenile idea new devs and interns get every now and then. But sometimes, a rewrite really is a good idea.

But in this case, per the announcement ( https://blog.torproject.org/announcing-arti/ ), the reasons are pretty convincing. The major reasons are, unsurprisingly, all around memory safety.

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1. mynameajeff ◴[12 Dec 25 14:48 UTC] No.46244637[source]▶
> Godot to Lumberyard Do you remember what project(s) this was? I'd be super curious on the motivations of the developers. I guess I could see it when it first went open source and Godot wasn't all it was today.
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2. lynndotpy ◴[12 Dec 25 18:11 UTC] No.46246839[source]▶
It was a project I worked on as an intern at Electric Boat. I can only speak to specifics I was explicitly given the okay to share though (i.e. this is all on my LinkedIn).

The project was a virtual training simulation for a submarine cockpit, first in Blender Game Engine. With support for BGE being deprecated, I was tasked to find an alternative engine and to port the work. (I'm very proud my research pointed to Godot- this was during the Godot 2 era).

There was a lot of interest in the project, but my internship was coming to an end and they decided to port it to Amazon Lumberyard for fear of Godot's longevity and support. They didn't want to be left "waiting for Godot". The final task I took on was to document the project, to make that transition easier for whoever came next.