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The Tor Project is switching to Rust

(itsfoss.com)
348 points giuliomagnifico | 1 comments | 12 Dec 25 12:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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anthk ◴[12 Dec 25 13:25 UTC] No.46243905[source]▶
Why not Go? It's more portable.
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pezezin ◴[12 Dec 25 13:59 UTC] No.46244203[source]▶
Portable to what? Rust works fine on all of today's popular platforms.

I see people complaining about Rust's lack of portability, and it is always some obsolete platform that has been dead for 20 years. Let's be serious, nobody is gonna run Tor on an old SGI workstation or Itanium server.

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yjftsjthsd-h ◴[12 Dec 25 19:42 UTC] No.46247927[source]▶
That's a good point, really there's no reason to waste time on anything but popular platforms. Obviously, of course, this means dropping support for everything except Windows (x64 and maybe ARM) and macOS (ARM). (\s)

In all seriousness, I guess you can make this argument if you only care about Windows/macOS, but the moment you run anything else I have to ask why, say, Linux deserves support but not other less-common platforms.

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pezezin ◴[12 Dec 25 23:12 UTC] No.46250193[source]▶
Because:

1) Development resources are finite.

2) Linux runs all of the world supercomputers, most of the internet infrastructure (server, routers, etc), most of the cellphones (Android), and lots of other things. Its global marketshare is way bigger than macOS and all the BSD put together.

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1. anthk ◴[13 Dec 25 07:56 UTC] No.46252912[source]▶
Try living without OpenSSH and the rest of *BSD contributions.