December 19, 2025
Tunnels, Rust, and Reddit rage
GotaTun -- Mullvad's WireGuard Implementation in Rust
Mullvad swaps its VPN engine; fans cheer speed, skeptics warn about safety and blocks
TLDR: Mullvad launched GotaTun for Android, a Rust-based upgrade that slashes crashes and speeds things up. The comments oscillate between applause, worries about forked implementations and security, calls to resist censorship, and one user’s bug report about phones refusing to sleep.
Mullvad just yanked out its Android VPN engine and dropped in GotaTun, a Rust-built take on WireGuard. The result: crashes fell from 0.40% to 0.01% and users report faster speeds and better battery—cue a wave of high-fives. One Pixel 8 owner bragged about jumping from 100 Mbps to 500+, then added a twist: a random “phone won’t sleep” bug, sparking a mini battery-drama.
The thread quickly turned philosophical. Is more than one implementation safer or riskier? One commenter framed it like a superhero showdown: diversity is good, but “double the attack surface” is bad. Meanwhile, nevi-me asked the spicy question: why not upstream changes to Cloudflare’s BoringTun instead of forking? That hit a nerve for folks who hate fragmentation.
A dev chimed in with a language war: Rust vs Go for networking. A Go fan showed off WrapGuard and wondered if Rust truly fits “firmware-ish” software better. The hottest take came from imcritic, who blasted the protocol itself: if governments and ISPs can block WireGuard, then smoother code won’t save you. Others pointed to Mullvad’s privacy extras like DAITA and Multihop and a promised third-party audit to calm nerves.
Bonus memes: tunnel puns galore—“GotaTun sounds like a Swedish metal band”—and “finally, a tunnel that doesn’t leak.” 2026 rollouts to iOS and desktop are coming, but the crowd wants answers: upstream drama, security tradeoffs, and censorship resilience.
Key Points
- •Mullvad launched GotaTun, a Rust-based WireGuard implementation forked from Cloudflare’s BoringTun.
- •GotaTun integrates DAITA and Multihop, provides first-class Android support, and uses safe multi-threading and zero-copy techniques for performance.
- •Mullvad previously used wireguard-go but faced stability issues, with over 85% of Android crash reports linked to it and difficult FFI debugging between Rust and Go.
- •After rolling out GotaTun on Android (version 2025.10), the user-perceived crash rate dropped from 0.40% to 0.01%, with reports of better speeds and lower battery use.
- •Plans include a third-party security audit early next year and replacing wireguard-go with GotaTun across desktop and iOS, with further performance improvements.