The Tor Project is switching to Rust

Complete rewrites are always a bad idea ... [mutters of agreement] ... except in Rust! [cheering]

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.

The issue is that every other week there is a rewrite of something in Rust. I just do an eyeroll whenever I see that yet another thing is being rewritten in Rust.

I've tried compiling large projects in Rust in a VM (8GB) and I've run out of memory whereas I am sure a C/C++ large project of a similar size wouldn't run out of memory. A lot of this tooling I had to compile myself because it wasn't available for my Linux distro (Debian 12 at the time).

A lot of the tooling reminds me of NPM, and after spending a huge amount of my time fighting with NPM, I actually prefer the way C/C++/CMake handles stuff.

I also don't like the language. I do personal stuff in C++ and I found Rust really irritating when learning the language (the return rules are weird) and just gave up with it.

To be fair, you haven't explained why it's an issue to see projects being rewritten in Rust, other than it is a bit annoying to you?

For me, I had a very good experience rewriting a project in Rust (from Python). It was just an improvement in every regard (the project was easier to build and distribute, it was a good opportunity to rearchitect it, and the code ended up 20k times faster.) So, I have the opposite feeling when I see titles like these.

I also feel the opposite about the tooling. For me, cmake, npm, pip, maven, etc. all live in this realm where any invocation could become a time purgatory. The big thing that makes me like Rust is that I've never had that experience with cargo. (In fact, pip was the primary motivation to move away from Python to Rust. Everything else was just nice.)

I'm not saying this to convince you to feel otherwise, I just wanted to offer how I felt about the same topics. I grew up with C and Java, but Rust clicked after I read SICP and followed along in Racket. I could probably fill a page of small grievances about Rust's syntax if I had to.