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.
Can someone explain more of the difference between C and Rust to a non programmer?
In C you can do almost anything, including things that will fry the system. In Rust, it’s a lot harder to do that. (This makes sense if you consider when the languages were made and what were made for. It’s not an attack on or praise for either language.)
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 thanstructInstance.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.
I can somewhat see the issue with memory safety, but the other issues are fine by me.
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.
c is for femboys, rust is for trans people
Looking at your instance handle, I hope/assume that your comment is supposed to be in lighthearted jest. However that would only be an assumption on my part and in general it’s not ok to say someone’s job/work tool is for [remarks directed at sex, gender, ethnicity, orientation, disabilities, etc…] per CoC 3.5.
Please take into consideration that members on this instance may be of different backgrounds than what you’re used to and interpets what you say differently. Further breaches of our Code of Conduct may lead to temporary or permament ban.