DARPA suggests turning legacy C code automatically into Rust • The Register
DARPA suggests turning legacy C code automatically into Rust • The Register
12 comments
-
-
Can't spell CVE without C 😉
No wonder security aware environments want to get rid of the language. It's a mess and a half (can't forget the buffer overflow).
However the suggestion of using AI kinda voids the proposal and erodes credibility.
-
Can't spell CVE without C. It's a mess and a half (can't forget the buffer overflow).
I'm saving these, folks are gonna love them lmao.
-
12 comments
How are they going to tackle heavy use of the C preprocessor?
What about pointer arithmetic without decorating everything with "unsafe"? As the whole point is making the code safer.
Can't have code vulnerabilities if the code doesn't run. taps forehead
The point is to reduce the amount of work by doing the boring work automatically. Manually copying struct definitions, functions, etc etc would be very boring but error prone work which is kind of the worst combination.
If that's done you can start improving the codebase module by module.
I guess it will translate the majority of the code which does not contain unsafe parts, and leave the pointer manipulation for manual rewrite.
you can just wrap a whole C code into a macroyeah, preprocessor is going to blow everything, I forgot how good it is. Maybe there's a way by preprocessing and then leaving it as the code, but that wouldn't be as useful and configurable
Rust also has powerful macros, are you sure that those can't mimic at least most uses of the preprocessor?