Tor Browser Will Feature More Rust Code (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "The Tor Browser, a heavily modified version of the Firefox browser with many privacy-enhancing features, will include more code written in the Rust programming language," reports BleepingComputer. In a meeting held last week in Amsterdam, Tor developers decided to slowly start using Rust to replace the C++ code. The decision comes after Mozilla started shipping Rust components with Firefox in 2016. Furthermore, Rust is a memory-safe(r) language than C++, the language used for Firefox and the customized Tor code, which means less memory corruption errors. Less of these errors means better privacy for all.
"Part of our interest in using safer languages like Rust in Tor is because a tiny mistake in C could have real consequences for real people," Tor developer Isis Agora Lovecruft posted on Twitter, adding "Also the barrier to entry for contributing to large OSS projects written in C is insanely high."

Comments

And the barrier for Rust isn't?

[AuMatar]

I'm pretty sure the number of programmers who know C is several orders of magnitude higher than Rust.

Re:And the barrier for Rust isn't?

[ljw1004]

I'm pretty sure the number of programmers who know C is several orders of magnitude higher than Rust.

I can't imagine that being a problem. Rust is a familiar looking language designed not to have shoot-yourself-in-the-foot holes. I'd expect a good developer, who's already familiar with other languages, to be contributing good PRs in Rust within a day.

Firefox is a project without a system engineer

[Big Smirk]

Is it so hard to write code that compiles with 0 errors and 0 warnings that will pass valgrind with with 0 warnings?

Firefox (and by extension Tor) need to figure out why with 70+ threads they still have deadlocks. Perhaps they need a language that doesn't do threading?

Actually I exaggerated, currently Firefox is only using 68 threads to display this page...

Project without a _REAL_ system engineer?