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From: Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh@hoffmanlabs.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: C to Rust translation
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2025 13:42:35 -0500
Organization: HoffmanLabs LLC
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Apropos of nothing, a recently-announced tool for translating C to Rust.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15042

"The popularity of the Rust language continues to explode; yet, many 
critical codebases remain authored in C, and cannot be realistically 
rewritten by hand. Automatically translating C to Rust is thus an 
appealing course of action. Several works have gone down this path, 
handling an ever-increasing subset of C through a variety of Rust 
features, such as unsafe. While the prospect of automation is 
appealing, producing code that relies on unsafe negates the memory 
safety guarantees offered by Rust, and therefore the main advantages of 
porting existing codebases to memory-safe languages.

We instead explore a different path, and explore what it would take to 
translate C to safe Rust; that is, to produce code that is trivially 
memory safe, because it abides by Rust's type system without caveats. 
Our work sports several original contributions: a type-directed 
translation from (a subset of) C to safe Rust; a novel static analysis 
based on "split trees" that allows expressing C's pointer arithmetic 
using Rust's slices and splitting operations; an analysis that infers 
exactly which borrows need to be mutable; and a compilation strategy 
for C's struct types that is compatible with Rust's distinction between 
non-owned and owned allocations."

Rust and Zig are among the language choices available for those looking 
to increntally translate and incrementally replace C source code with 
something else. Swift interoperates with C and C++ code well too, but 
that's mostly targeting Apple platforms.

https://ziglang.org


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC