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DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course (www.theregister.com)

submitted 4 months ago by lemmee_in@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev

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To accelerate the transition to memory safe programming languages, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is driving the development of TRACTOR, a programmatic code conversion vehicle.

The term stands for TRanslating All C TO Rust. It's a DARPA project that aims to develop machine-learning tools that can automate the conversion of legacy C code into Rust.

The reason to do so is memory safety. Memory safety bugs, such buffer overflows, account for the majority of major vulnerabilities in large codebases. And DARPA's hope is that AI models can help with the programming language translation, in order to make software more secure.

"You can go to any of the LLM websites, start chatting with one of the AI chatbots, and all you need to say is 'here's some C code, please translate it to safe idiomatic Rust code,' cut, paste, and something comes out, and it's often very good, but not always," said Dan Wallach, DARPA program manager for TRACTOR, in a statement.

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[–] Joey@programming.dev 7 points 4 months ago

So a translation of legacy code into Rust would either attain memory safety, or wouldn’t compile.

They'd probably have to make sure it doesn't use the unsafe keyword to guarantee this.