Researchers build a bridge from C to Rust and memory safety
January 14, 2025

Researchers build a bridge from C to Rust and memory safety

“I think [this technique] could be of great value to C developers because it could jumpstart the transition to Rust and also help those programmers learn Rust, which can be a difficult transition,” said Jim Mercer, program vice president of software engineering, DevOps and DevSecOps. at IDC.

“It’s not exactly a Cobol situation,” Mercer added, “but many key C programmers are approaching retirement, so maintaining these applications and systems may become a more important issue in the future. Plus, we’re so focused on memory safety that we lose sight of Rust’s other benefits. It offers modern language features such as concurrency primitives, pattern matching, and a powerful type system that can lead to more concise, expressive, and maintainable code.”

Moor’s Andersen pointed to additional benefits. “One promising thing is using generative AI to help speed up Mini-C and the migration process,” he said. “We’re starting to see cloud providers like AWS and IBM creating tools to help move from .NET to Java or even from Cobol to Java. Maybe a tool like Q developer might someday translate Rust to C.”

2025-01-09 21:55:03

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