It reeks of a consultant who sold upper management via a gated demo.

You would also port the tests, right?

Also:

As to the possibility of automatic code conversion, Morales said, "It's definitely a DARPA-hard problem." The number of edge cases that come up when trying to formulate rules for converting statements in different languages is daunting, he said.

I'm thinking they also want to future proof this.

The quantity of C devs are dying. It's a really difficult language to get competent with.

If DARPA really wanted safer languages, they could be pushing test coverage,

Or Ada...

A: "We really need this super-important and highly-technical job done."
B: "We could just hire a bunch of highly-technical people to do it."
A: "No, we would have to hire people and that would cost us millions."
B: "We could spend billions on untested technology and hope for the best."
A: "Excellent work B! Charge the government $100M for our excellent idea."

You want Skynet? 'Cause that's how you get Skynet.

Too bad commenters are as bad as reading articles as LLMs are at handling complex scenarios. And are equally as confident with their comments.

This is a pretty level headed, calculated, approach DARPA is taking (as expected from DARPA).

On a bit serious note, flux.1 model is pretty good…

Ghidra is open source?! How did I miss this!

I threw some simple code at it and it even put unsafe on the main function, what's the point of Rust then if everything is unsafe?

The problem I see here is that AI may write code that does compile, but has a bunch of logical errors, edge cases or bad architecture. From personal experience, even though AI can write small amounts of good code, it's bad at understanding big and complex solutions.

At that point, fixing the AI codebase might take longer than just starting with a competent Rust dev.

so-called AI

knows its own limits

frustration noises It knows nothing! It's not intelligent. It doesn't understand anything. Attempts to keep those things acting within expected/desired lines fail constantly, and not always due to malice. This project's concept reeks of laziness and trend-following. Instead of a futile effort to make a text generator reliably produce either an error or correct code, they should perhaps put that effort into writing a transpiler built on knowable, understandable rules. ... Oh, and just hire a damn Rust dev. They're climbing up the walls looking to Rust-ify everything, just let them do it.

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.

There is a ton of literature out there, but in a few words:

Rust is built from the ground up with the intention of being safe, and fast. There are a bunch of things you can do when programming that are technically fine but often cause errors. Rust builds on decades of understanding of best practices and forces the developer to follow them. It can be frustrating at first but being forced to use best practices is actually a huge boon to the whole community.

C is a language that lets the developer do whatever the heck they want as long as it's technically possible. "Dereferencing pointer 0?" No problem boss. C is fast but there are many many pitfalls and mildly incorrect code can cause significant problems, buffer overflows for example can open your system to bad actors sending information packets to the program and cause your computer to do whatever the bad actor wants. You can technically write code with that problem in both c and rust, but rust has guardrails that keep you out of trouble.

In C you can do almost anything, including things that will fry the system. In Rust, it's a lot harder to do that. (This makes sense if you consider when the languages were made and what were made for. It's not an attack on or praise for either language.)

C: Older systems developing language, pretty much industry standard to the point the C-style syntax is often a feature of other languages. Its biggest issues include a massive lack of syntax sugar, such as having to do structTypeFunction(structInstance) rather than structInstance.function() as standard in more modern languages, use of header files and a precompiler (originally invented to get around memory limitations and still liked by hard-core C fans, otherwise disliked by everyone else), and lack of built-in memory safety features, which is especially infamous with its null-terminated strings, often being part of many attack vectors and bugs.

Rust: Newer memory-safe language with functional programming features, most notably const by default, and while it does use curly braces for scopes (code blocks), the general syntax is a bit alien to the C-style of languages. Due to its heavy memory safety features, which also includes a borrow checker, not to mention the functional programming aspects, it's not a drop in replacement language for C to the point you pretty much have too reimplement the algorithms in functional style.