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To that end, Canonical, along with UK Research and Innovation, is funding a three year PhD project to create a platform that will translate hundreds of thousands of lines of C code into Rust. The project will be led by Professor Meng Wang, with Seager and Dr. Cristina David as co-supervisors of PhD student Alex Wood.
It’s not as easy as it may sound, Seager wrote. “Traditional source-to-source translators can process substantial amounts of code, but often preserve the structure of the C too literally. The result may compile as Rust, but still rely heavily on unsafe operations, retain awkward C idioms and require significant manual work before it resembles code a Rust maintainer would choose to own.”
On the other hand, a large language model (LLM) can create “convincing, idiomatic Rust” but struggles with “repository-scale context,” Seager said. And, he added, “more importantly, plausible-looking output is not evidence that the translated program behaves like its source.”
