[tor-dev] Arti development report: 23 June through July 7

[Nick Mathewson]

# Arti Report 1: 23 June through July 7

We started with a project kickoff meeting.  We're planning to continue
meeting every 2 weeks, making our meetings increasingly public, and
posting them on youtube.

We wrote up an announcement to explain what Arti is and why we're doing
it.  The [announcement](https://blog.torproject.org/announcing-arti)
goes live on July 8; it's a good place to start if you're not already
familiar with the project, or if you're looking for more helpful links.

To get ready for future development, and check the state of our packages
we put out an [0.0.0 release](https://crates.io/crates/arti) and
uploaded it to crates.io.  We found a couple of issues while doing so
([#129][ticket-129], [#130][ticket-130]).

We want to switch as much new-feature development to Arti as we can.
With that in mind, we're developing a set of guidelines for discouraging
features in C -- especially features with the potential to destabilize
our code. (See [#128][ticket-128].)  We're trying a bottom-up approach
here, starting by identifying what kinds of features we've done recently
that maybe we should skip in the future.

We had an excellent meeting with developers on various Zcash projects,
to gather requirements, set expectations, and open lines of
communication.  Based on their suggestions, we opened a set of new
tickets to work on.  ([#132][ticket-132] [#133][ticket-133]
[#134][ticket-134] [#135][ticket-135] [#136][ticket-136]
[#137][ticket-137] [#138][ticket-138] [#139][ticket-139]
[#140][ticket-140])

In terms of new code written, things have been a bit slow: we're still
ramping up, and a lot of folks take vacations in the summer.  We
[revised our asynchronous runtime backend][ticket-129] based on issues
we found while uploading our packages.  More recently, I've started
working on an [implementation][ticket-57] of Tor's
[circuit timeout inference][cti] code, which is necessary for good
performance and security.

## Next steps

In our next couple of weeks, I hope we get a first cut at our circuit
timeout code finished and working, and figure out a reasonable initial
solution for our [persistence needs][ticket-59].  We'll also be ramping
up on implementations for [guard nodes][ticket-58] and
[stream isolation][ticket-73], both of which are necessary for security.


[ticket-57]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/57
[ticket-58]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/58
[ticket-59]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/59
[ticket-73]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/73
[ticket-128]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/128
[ticket-129]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/129
[ticket-130]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/130
[ticket-132]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/132
[ticket-133]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/133
[ticket-134]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/134
[ticket-135]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/135
[ticket-136]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/136
[ticket-137]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/137
[ticket-138]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/138
[ticket-139]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/139
[ticket-140]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/140
[cti]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/master/path-spec.txt#L364