Canonical backs new project to translate large C codebases into safe Rust

jedisct1

Have you heard about fil-c?

1892379

Why would Canonical even be an expert in this? They mostly have sysadmin types of employees. The (elusive) end goal is of course to steal all C code bases, fully automate Debian with LLMs, fire all useful idiots who vote in Canonical's interest in Debian resolutions and control the Debian derivative market.

kayo_20211030

I have no particular religious preference for a language. One uses what one feels is appropriate. But, let's say this effort is a complete success. What's next? Can all the maintainers of the c codebase move over to maintaining (forward) the Rust codebase. Surely there'll be some friction, and losses to friction. What about deployments, monitoring, support and trouble-shooting? Are the teams that perform those functions now capable of performing those functions in the future? It seems to me that the here-to-there for functional, evolving and reliable systems in the real world has been elided and become simply "a player to be named later".

djoldman

Not the same as: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils Although I could see them benefitting.

dgan

can it be done? C codebase are obviously missing the lifetime information, type-generic arguments are just void*, in/out arguments aren't explicit... or at least, the information is scattered across the codebase, and might be inconsistent. a "safe rust" might not be even possible

qew16t

Great stuff. Instead of asking and funding the C developers of the respective projects for a port, they go for license washing and stealing.

ChrisArchitect

Source: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/investing-in-automated-c-to-r... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361334 )

childintime

The Darpa Tractor project looks to achieve the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41110269 Just a few weeks back it was judged as unlikely to succeed. Now Canonical want to get in.

golbez9

Be serious about change, re-write it in Zig