YARA-X 1.0.0: The Stable Release and Its Advantages

Audio version of this post, created with NotebookLM Deep Dive

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

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