[tor-dev] Stem ORPort protocol support

[meejah]

Damian Johnson <atagar at torproject.org> writes:

> they'd care to go (potentially all the way up to a Python Tor client,
> similar to Orchid).

So, there is this already -- not sure how "complete" it is though (and
looks like hasn't seen commits for 2+ years) but might have useful code:

   https://github.com/pycepa/pycepa

There is also this one, that I've barely looked at (and is older than
the above) based around Scapy:

   https://github.com/cea-sec/TorPylle

For any of these efforts, writing a "Tor protocol library" that
*doesn't* do any I/O would be the most useful; then other Python tools
can benefit from the protocol support without being tied to "threads" or
to a particular async framework.

One of the best examples of this style of library is the hyper/h2
implementation of HTTP2 (which powers Twisted's HTTP2 support and also
supports threaded HTTP2 servers and clients) by separating the
"protocol" implementation into its own library (that does no I/O and
doesn't start any threads "for" you). This style is usually referred to
as "sans-io" (at least in the Python community). You can read more about
these libraries: https://python-hyper.org

It would be really cool to have a Python implementation of the Tor
protocol -- and double-extra-useful if it's a "pure" protocol library
without any messy I/O constructs involved :)


Cheers,
meejah