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

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 0x0 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I can somewhat see the issue with memory safety, but the other issues are fine by me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Even then, D would be a better drop-in replacement, especially in BetterC mode, since it has a currently optional memory safety feature, which is planned to be less optional in a possible Version 3. I personally only have ran into an issue that would have been solved by a "const by default" approach (meaning a function had an unintended side effect, for which the functional approach is to disallow side effects as much as possible), but it would be extra annoying for my own purpose (game development).

The biggest fixer of "unintended side effects" is memory safety, since you won't have memory overwrites.