This is exciting not only because of the Tor project itself but because this will set an example for other projects to follow.
This creates also an opportunity to engage Mozilla into contributing
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Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
91–100 of 254 posts
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#92I live and love in Amsterdam and Golang seems to be the quintessential hipster language for this quintessentially hipster city.
Booking.com's soup du jour if you will.
Basically, if you aren't using JavaScript in a web shop, and you claim to be a "full-stack" "ninja", then probably you are using Go around here as a jobbing programmer.
I know that sounds terribly cynical and obviously a massive generalization but that is my personal experience.
I don't have a problem with Go per-se, but I do have a problem that a lot of people seem to go to extreme lengths to defend what someone else mentioned is frankly a pretty "mundane" language, citing memory safety, but more strangely portability and performance as its wonderful virtues.
When I meet with the zealots of the Go community around here I often have to quickly excuse myself with good grace.
Seriously, if that's what you want... go (pardon the pun) use C#, it is a saner and more expressive language, has a higher performance runtime and is way more portable with less vendor / career lock-in.
Go... I just don't get it.
Positives... Has a fairly nice package manager like npm.
Isn't made by Microsoft if that's your thing.
Oh and heaven forbid you don't have to think much... until you do because it is slow.
For a project like Tor though, which is damn slow as it is, I think it is totally the wrong choice.
Developers, please suck it up, get over it and learn C/C++ and some variation of Lisp.
Fine, go play with different languages for fun stuff. Use python for ML, try serious meta-programming in D, or jump into Haskell for kicks.
On the other hand modern C++ really can be a very safe language to work in if you can be bothered, and you are only deceiving yourself and your project going with something less sympathetic to the machine itself, especially if you are working on infrastructure level systems.
Sorry if this offends anyone, and of course it is just one opinion, but I think I'm being fairly nice as compared to what Linus might have said in comparison.
Basically stop it with the hobbyist shit. You are horrifying me and probably many others.
You aren't writing a web page here, so please treat the project seriously.
IMHO
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
But all those parentheses! I know it sounds like a lame reason to dislike a language, but I've always found staring at Lisp to be so much more difficult and distracting than C-style syntax.
Did you try coding in it for more than a week? I have found that using a properly indenting editor (Emacs, drracket) the parents just fade away. And then you discover paredit and you start wishing every other language would let you treat your source code like that.
Yes. I was required to use Lisp for intro comp sci in College, followed by all the AI courses in Lisp, then a few jobs.
It's just never been a go to language for me.
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So was Erlang. The language, the runtime, and the standard library were all purpose-built together to solve a real world problem... to build fault-tolerant, distributed network applications. I'm probably outing myself as the lord regent of all impostor plebs, but Erlang is not IMO an approachable language regardless of its origins. Put differently : it looks completely nuts. I'm sure there's a method to the madness…
Erlang is a very simple language. It doesn't look like C, but it has a very basic syntax and a narrow set of core constructs. Elixir by comparison is significantly more complicated, but the fact that it looks tacitly like Ruby is apparently very attractive. I suspect I could sit down with you for an hour and remove all the weirdest seeming bits which feel alien. Such that the rest of it would just feel like any other…
I don't think looking like Ruby is at all what makes people like Elixir. Maybe it has attracted a bunch of people to look at it because of that, but I don't think that's why anyone stays (because anyone who cares about that quickly realizes that it isn't actually very much like Ruby at all). I agree that it's a more complex language (though I wouldn't say "significantly", but that's very subjective), but it doesn't really "feel" that way to me because its design choices seem more consistent. But on top of that, it has really good tooling, which I always found to be a major pain point in getting started with Erlang.
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#95This is either a horribly timed announcement or a joke written very seriously. I have no idea which.
Well not everyone in every culture thinks no serious work can be done on April 1st.
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#96As a mere average user of computer languages, every time I play around with Go I start wondering how a language like this became so popular. It feels like it was invented in a universe where Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Smalltalk, Lisp and so many more languages and research in languages never happened.
Go is designed for average programmers working in a huge organization. That's why its dullness is a virtue.
Seems weird that from what I hear about the intense interview process that Google programmers go through that they'd feel a need to dumb down the language of choice.
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#97I live and love in Amsterdam and Golang seems to be the quintessential hipster language for this quintessentially hipster city. Booking.com's soup du jour if you will. Basically, if you aren't using JavaScript in a web shop, and you claim to be a "full-stack" "ninja", then probably you are using Go around here as a jobbing programmer. I know that sounds terribly cynical and obviously a massive generalization but that…
You do realize they didn't pick Go, yes?
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
This creates also an opportunity to engage Mozilla into contributing
If any of the developers are reading this, converting the existing C code to SaferCPlusPlus[1] (a memory safe subset of C++) is probably a more expedient solution (if that's what they're looking for). (And speaking of contributing, an automatic translation (assistance) tool is in early development, and could maybe be functional in short order with a little extra motivated talent... :) [1] shameless plug: https://gith…
I would recommend updating your .gitignore for VS2015. The .vs directory and *.VC.db should both be excluded from the repo.
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#99I am curious why they were advised not to use Go. Probably not a safety concern. Edit: cgo != Go. Thanks for the responses. I have done a bit of Go, but just pure Go.
Go and Rust are very different languages. Rust is, by design, well-suited to Tor's use case, where they have a large C or C++ program and they need to incrementally rewrite parts of it (and maybe never all of it!) in a better language. It turns out (or so I hear) that Google statically links everything in production, and has been using C++ as a language to implement HTTP endpoints for a long time. So Go is a better C…
Totally agree, and Rust isn't a sane choice either even though the points you make are valid.
Rust has some interesting features, but being C isn't one of them.
Re: Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam
#100As a mere average user of computer languages, every time I play around with Go I start wondering how a language like this became so popular. It feels like it was invented in a universe where Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Smalltalk, Lisp and so many more languages and research in languages never happened.
When you talk about Go I think you should start with C.
One of my professors used to tell us, that C was built by people who wanted to use it and didn't care about academic style.
In many ways Go is just the next step of C. C did not have object orientation and even passing functions around was kinda hard. While C++ tried to bring object orientation to C (total failure) Go decided to keep the core values of C and instead improved the rough features (e.g. easier binding of functions to structures, faster build times).
By making it easier to pass around functions Go enables functional programming styles, but at its core, it is still just an improved C. The only revolution within Go (as a language) is the concurrency and channel concept and I think that was taken from some functional language (not sure).
I really like Go, because it just feels right. It might not be as clean as Smalltalk or Lisp, but it has data structures and functions, teaches you how important interfaces are and lets you build highly concurrent applications with ease. In addition, it brings a nice set of tools which integrate well into a shell driven workflow.
After all, the whole thing should not surprise anybody as Ken Thompson[1] was part of the Team which invented Go.