YARA-X 1.0.0: The Stable Release and Its Advantages
Audio version of this post, created with NotebookLM Deep Dive
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Short note for everyone who already lives and breathes YARA:
Victor (aka plusvic) just launched YARA-X 1.0.0.
Full details: https://virustotal.github.io/yara-x/blog/yara-x-is-stable/
What changes for you
| Area | YARA 4.x | YARA-X |
|---|---|---|
| Engine | C/C++, manual memory | Rust, memory-safe |
| Rule compatibility | – | ~99 % work as-is |
| Speed (regex / loops) | Can bottleneck scans | Often 5–10× faster |
| Error messages | Generic | Line-accurate, clearer |
| CLI | Plain text | Colour, JSON/YAML dump, shell completion |
| Future work | Bug-fix only | New features land here |
Why move now
- Performance – heavy rules (large regex, deep loops) finish seconds faster.
- Safety – Rust core avoids the usual memory bugs and makes crashes rare.
- Maintainability – parser and scanner are decoupled; easier to embed or extend.
- Better tooling – built-in formatter (yara-x fmt), linter-friendly output.
- Active roadmap – new language features will go to YARA-X only.
We already use YARA-X at VirusTotal for Livehunt and Retrohunt. Billions of files later, it behaves.
Give it a spin, report issues, and send feedback our way. Huge thanks to Victor for pushing the project this far. Let’s keep making pattern matching simpler and faster
.
Read more: YARA-X 1.0.0: The Stable Release and Its Advantages
Story added 4. June 2025, content source with full text you can find at link above.