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.

> 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 guess you and me live different lives because I have spent far more time messing with ancient C/C++/CMake/Automake/Autoconf/configure/just have this particular .so file in this particular spot/copy some guys entire machine because this project only builds there/learn and entirely different language just to write build files (CMake sucks and 5 other alternatives are just lipstick on a pig) etc. etc.

I am of the opinion that half of Rusts success is based on that fact that C/C++'s tooling is annoying and ancient. People want to write code not mess with build envs.