Canonical backs quest to translate mountains of C into safe Rust with AI
Bungs banknotes at Bristol boffins to find out if mature code survives the machine
Canonical is co-funding a three-year PhD project to explore translating large C codebases into Rust using AI. Engineering vice president Jon Seager announced the investment on Ubuntu's Discourse forum. The research will be conducted at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group. The project aims to decompose large C programs into smaller components and rewrite them in safe, correct and maintainable Rust.
Canonical will not replace all of Ubuntu with Rust, but rather investigate the feasibility of this approach. The project will examine specific tools like snap-confine and AppArmor, which have alternative implementations in Rust. The university and UK Research and Innovation are co-sponsoring the project with Canonical. While skeptics question the viability of automatic programming language translation, Canonical believes this research could improve software reliability by exposing unknown errors.
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