The TRACTOR program aims to automate the translation of legacy C code to Rust. The goal is to achieve the same quality and style that a skilled Rust developer would produce, thereby eliminating the entire class of memory safety security vulnerabilities present in C programs. This program may involve novel combinations of software analysis, such as static analysis and dynamic analysis, and machine learning techniques like large language models.
Highlights from the forum thread:
There’s even a conspiracy theory that the Rust Foundation’s 501 organization type was chosen so it can conduct lobbying. The implication being that the Rust Foundation is behind government recommendations to move toward memory safe languages. (Big Borrow-Checker, if you will).
Assuming a worst case scenario, this could be the worst thing to happen to Rust’s image. We end up with billions of lines of rewritten Rust code that is full of soundness and logic bugs, and that no one understands.
DARPA funds some projects on a “there is an infinitesimal chance of success, but if you succeed, it’s a big deal” basis. Silent Talk is an example here - very unlikely to succeed, even at the beginning, but if you could hold a radio conversation without sound, that’d be a huge deal for special operations forces.
Maybe it would be easier to translate to Ada? That is for C code that doesn’t make heavy use of malloc/free. The idea of Rust’s borrow checker as I understand it is to statically track the references to malloc’d memory to make sure that you never use-after-free or double-free. If your C code uses malloc in uncontrolled ways, then massaging it to satisfy a borrow checker sounds horribly difficult and you should either give up, or run it under a very managed environment like valgrind. If (as is typical of embedded code) it just does stuff with some fixed memory buffers and doesn’t do much runtime allocation, then there isn’t anything for a borrow checker to look after, so you can use a safe language (Ada) that doesn’t have borrow checking.
Disclaimer: I don’t use Rust at the moment. Someday. I do like Ada despite its verbosity, but it’s not that great at managing dynamic memory. It is starting to take on Rust influences to help with that.
AFAIK you can get around this by using raw pointers / unsafe blocks in Rust, then have a human target those to rewrite it in a safe, structured way.