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.
You’re missing the key part of the argument: relicensing.
Which speaks to my other comment: nothing about Rust necessitates using corpo licenses. The reason so many things are being rewritten in Rust is that it’s a great language and it provides tangible benefits to users. The owning class doesn’t need a special language as a pretext to de-GPL an ecosystem. They could do it with C, OCAML, or any other lang.
The language, as an inanimate object, doesn’t have an ideology, sure. However, people running the show in partnership with the ruling class have.
IMO any speech about Rust rewritings must denounce how the language can be, and it is, being used to attack software freedom.
I’m not sure I understand what you meant (there may be a typo in there).
This, I agree with. It is very concerning that Rust has so much corporate buy-in. And the structure of The Rust Foundation being operated more like a business than something like the Zig Software Foundation does worry me.
But I often feel the need to chime-in and correct the common misconception that
Rust rewrite == corpo-relicense. It’sfalseand I think the conspiratorial coupling of Rust to corporate embrace-extend-extinguish only serves to discourage people from writing better software.I would love to see a community fork of Rust and its ecosystem one day, but I don’t think we get there by discouraging people from writing or using Rust software.
This is a bit of a tangent, so I didn’t include it in the above comment, but I don’t think “open source” is sufficiently anti-capitalist, so the (A)GPL was never going to save us to begin with. “Open source”, as defined by the OSI (a.k.a. a handful of megacorps in a trench coat) and the FSF, prevent “discrimination of use”. So if you want your software to be “open source” or “free software”, you have to accept that your software can be used by for-profit entities to exploit your labor, and potentially to perform heinous acts, such as military or surveillance usage. What we currently call “copyleft” is actually just copylib 😭
No open source license, not even the (A)GPL, allows you to forbid this. Unfortunately, I don’t see an alternative framework being widely adopted anytime soon. It seems that the best you can do for now is use niche licenses like this and just accept that your software can’t be considered “open source” :/
there’s gccrs
My understanding of
gccrsis that it merely provides a way to compile Rust software with GCC instead of LLVM, which is great! But it’s such a small piece of the Rust ecosystem (it’s merely a frontend). Maybe it’d be a good starting point for a more copyleft ecosystem in the future though.