Re: the importance of rust-build-system [Fwd: [tor-dev] Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam]

[ng0 <contact.ng0@cryptolab.net>]

Oh sweet damn.... My friends and myself so ignorant of this April Fools
annoyance that I would say: Please double check this message if
torproject
does not have the same opinion on aprils fools as I do.

But: the message of tor was merely an opener to my question. I'm still
curious in what needs to be done so that I can get people to join on the
rust parts of my project ;)

ng0 transcribed 4.2K bytes:
> tor is seriously considering to switch to rust. I have my own open
> bugs / roadmap points which depend on our rust-build-system working.
> tor will not switch immediately, but it shows the importance of having a
> working rust-build-system. Firefox will switch at some point.
> Danny, could you list what's left for completion? Is it just circular
> dependencies? I'm about to publish my project page within the next few
> days. I hope you don't mind if I list you as a go-to person for getting
> involved in upstream (Guix) to fix up the rust-build-system.
> If you do mind, please let me know. I will not publish your email
> address, I'll rather point to a git commit.
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from Sebastian Hahn -----
> 
> From: Sebastian Hahn
> To: tor-dev@lists.torproject.org
> Subject: [tor-dev] Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
> 
> Hi there tor-dev,
> 
> as an update to those who didn't have the chance to meet with us in
> Amsterdam or those who haven't followed the efforts to rely on C less,
> here's what happened at the "let's not fight about Go versus Rust, but
> talk about how to migrate Tor to a safer language" session and what
> happened after.
> 
> Notes from session:
> 
> We didn't fight about Rust or Go or modern C++. Instead, we focused on
> identifying goals for migrating Tor to a memory-safe language, and how
> to get there. With that frame of reference, Rust emerged as a extremely
> strong candidate for the incremental improvement style that we
> considered necessary. We were strongly advised to not use cgo, by people
> who have used it extensively.
> 
> As there are clearly a lot of unknowns with this endeavor, and a lot
> that we will learn/come up against along the way, we feel that Rust is a
> compelling option to start with,  with the caveat that we will first
> experiment, learn from the experience, and then build on what we learn.
> 
> You can also check out the session notes on the wiki (submitted, but not
> posted yet).[1]
> 
> The real fun part started after the session. We got together to actually
> make a plan for an experiment and to give Rust a serious chance. We
> quickly got a few trivial things working like statically linking Rust
> into Tor, integrating with the build system to call out to cargo for the
> Rust build, and using Tor's allocator from Rust.
> 
> We're planning to write up a blog post summarizing our experiences so
> far while hopefully poking the Rust developers to prioritize the missing
> features so we can stop using nightly Rust soon (~months, instead of
> years).
> 
> We want to have a patch merged into tor soon so you can all play with
> your dev setup to help identify any challenges. We want to stress that
> this is an optional experiment for now, we would love feedback but
> nobody is paid to work on this and nobody is expected to spend more
> time than they have sitting around.
> 
> We have committed to reviewing any patch that includes any Rust code to
> provide feedback, get experience to develop a style, and actually make
> use of this experiment. This means we're not ready to take on big
> patches that add lots of tricky stuff quite now, we want to take it slow
> and learn from this.
> 
> We would like to do a session at the next dev meeting to give updates on
> this effort, but in the meantime, if team members would like to start
> learning Rust and helping us identify/implement small and well-isolated
> areas to begin migration, or new pieces of functionality that we can
> build  immediately in Rust, that would be really great.
> 
> So, for a TLDR:
> 
> What has already been done:
> - Rust in Tor build
> - Putting together environment setup instructions and a (very small)
>  initial draft for coding standards
> - Initial work to identify good candidates for migration (not tightly
>  interdependent)
> 
> What we think are next steps:
> - Define conventions for the API boundary between Rust and C
> - Add a non-trivial Rust API and deploy with a flag to optionally use
>  (to test support with a safe fallback)
> - Learn from similar projects
> - Add automated tooling for Rust, such as linting and testing
> 
> 
> Cheers
> Alex, Chelsea, Sebastian
> 
> [1]: Will be visible here https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Amsterdam/Notes
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> 
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>