Write blogpost on future/expectations for Rust in tor?
During the Montréal team meetings, the Network Team discussed potentially writing a blogpost to describe:
- our experiences so far with Rust,
- how to currently build tor with
--enable-rust
(and what that currently means), - how others can help out, i.e. our packagers, volunteer mobile developers, and those who are running tor on exotic (micro)architectures, can all test builds now before we turn Rust on by default,
- our current (proposed) timeline for making Rust on-by-default (i.e. after Firefox, and thus Tor Browser, makes it required-by-default, sometime between March and June 2018),
- links to documentation and guidelines,
- soliciting feedback and collaboration between other companies/projects using Rust as a first-class language (i.e. Bouyant, Mozilla, Dropbox, etc.),
- our goals and hopes for the future,
- etc.
I know we're all hesitant to promise anything, in the event that this experiment goes awry somewhere, but we should be careful also to not take people by surprise. So without promising anything, this should help make people generally aware of the efforts so far, so that if we end up going with Rust we're not taking anyone (especially downstream people!) by surprise. (Also it does give us another shiny bonus thing to point funders at.)
We probably should aim to have this ready upon, or shortly after, the release of 0.3.3, since one of our expressed goals was to have several modules optionally written in Rust at that point.