As part of the collaboration between Canonical and the University of Bristol, the project will target AppArmor and snap-confine as industrial case studies. Both are critical to Ubuntu’s security posture, and provide a substantially harder test than isolated translation examples. They will help us evaluate whether the techniques can cope with the structure and constraints of mature production software.
Note that this is not a commitment to replace AppArmor or snap-confine with what is generated, rather that we have a vested interest in the software and are keen to see the results.
The most optimistic outcome would be a system capable of translating substantial C repositories into Rust with strong evidence of behavioural equivalence and relatively little manual intervention. The research could also produce better methods for decomposing repositories, stronger validation techniques, reusable translation datasets, improved program-repair tools and a more precise understanding of where automated migration stops being reliable.
Yes and no. It forces programmers to a certain workflow like using a borrow checker to manage memory, but it actually makes programmer’s lives easier, because it prevents bugs from runtime. The compiler will throw a fit, over your buggy code if you try to compile, unlike C.
The funny part is that rust is actually a high level language that can do low level stuff.
Yes. I prefer C because it is easier to learn than rust, and feel like rust is more comparable to C++. I also feel like llm plus rust is a good combo, these days.