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 investing in a three-year PhD project to explore translating large C codebases into safe, maintainable Rust using AI. Engineering vice president Jon Seager announced the funding on Ubuntu's Discourse forum, emphasizing the project's focus on maintaining the original code structure rather than replacing it entirely. Unlike other tools that struggle to produce reliable results, this project aims to uncover whether large codebases contain valuable knowledge that a machine translation could preserve.
Canonical is collaborating with the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group on the initiative, which will examine specific tools like snap-confine and AppArmor. While skepticism remains regarding the viability of generative AI for code translation, Canonical's investment demonstrates their commitment to exploring the potential benefits of improving software reliability through automatic translation between programming languages.
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