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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."
"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."
You want an app that's supposed to protect your security online to be written by someone who hasn't studied or used the language but decided they could do well enough "within a day"? Yeah, no thanks.
Honestly, yes. A clean language like Rust means that you won't get problems due to misuse of the language no matter how new you are to it; only due to misunderstanding of algorithms or architecture or security principals. The whole point of the comparison with C is that after a decade of experience in C you'll still find accidental security flaws due to unspotted buffer overruns or read-after-free.