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.
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?
For all of our sake, I hope humans are the final set of eyes before the code is used in prod.
Ideally you don’t directly ship the code it outputs, you use it instead of re-writing it from scratch and then slowly clean it up.
Like Mozilla used it for the initial port of qcms (the colour management library they wrote for Firefox), then slowly edited the code to be idiomatic rust code. Compare that to something like librsvg that did a function by function port
