| ▲ | Investing in automated C to Rust translation(discourse.ubuntu.com) | |||||||||||||
| 6 points by pbui 10 hours ago | 5 comments | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | voakbasda 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||
Automated transforms like this seem risky at best and dangerous at worst, due to one fundamental truth about computer software: garbage in, garbage out. The transform can be perfectly correct, but any bugs in the input will be translated along with the rest. Yet, I somehow doubt translation will be perfect, in that same way that translations among spoken languages have idioms that never quite carry across their full meaning. So, yes, this can “reduce the risk”, but the nature of the tool seems to carry high inherent risk. I would hope no one tries to vibe this kind of transformation on a large legacy production code base without giving the results a line-by-line audit. | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | erminpour 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||
"If we want more systems software to benefit from memory safety, we need better ways to reduce the cost and risk of migration." What about using CHERI or Memory Tagging? Rewriting an established and mature codebase seems like the wrong approach. This seems less like "We want to prevent memory errors." and more like "We hate C, we want Rust." | ||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | up2isomorphism 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||
Ubuntu has not been famous for robustness as a distribution. It seems the tastes is a major factor as seen in this case. | ||||||||||||||