What comes out of c2rust is not intended for human consumption. It's more verbose than the original and harder to work on, but no safer. You lose the C idioms that people understand, while not gaining Rust idioms. It's like working on compiler-generated assembly code by hand.

2022 discussion on HN.[1]

There's a DARPA funded effort called TRACTOR, Translate All C To Rust, which has funded some efforts to develop a usable translator.[2] It's about 10 months after award, with no reported progress. I've been checking the personal sites of the academics involved, and they barely mention the project, although $5 million has been allocated to it.[3] The approach comes from U.C. Berkeley - let the LLM generate slop, check it using formal methods.[4] Not expecting near-term results.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30169263

[2] https://csl.illinois.edu/news-and-media/translating-legacy-c...

[3] https://chandrasekaran-group.github.io/

[4] https://metalift.pages.dev/

> let the LLM generate slop, check it using formal methods

I'm much more bullish on the opposite approach. Perform the naive translation, let the LLM loose on cleaning it up...