Hello, We are a team of researchers working on the design and implementation of a traffic-analysis resistant anonymity network and we would like to request your opinion regarding the choice of a programming language / environment. Here are the criteria: 1) Familiarity: The language should be familiar or easy to learn for most potential contributors, as we hope to build a diverse community that builds on and contributes to the code. 2) Maturity: The language implementation, tool chain and libraries should be mature enough to support a production system. 3) Language security: The language should minimize the risk of security relevant bugs like buffer overflows. 4) Security of runtime / tool chain: It should be hard to inconspicuously backdoor the tool chain and, if applicable, runtime environments. To give two concrete examples: Using the C language + deterministic builds is an attractive option with respect to 1), 2) and 4), but doesn’t provide much regarding 3). Java does better with respect to 3), however, it trades some of 3) and 4) as compared to C. Specifically, we are concerned that large runtimes may be difficult to audit. A similar argument may apply to other interpreted languages. Given these criteria, what language would you choose and for what reasons? We would also appreciate feedback regarding our criteria. All the best, David, Nick, Peter, Stevens, and William