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DARPA: Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR) (users.rust-lang.org)

submitted 3 months ago by Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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The TRACTOR program aims to automate the translation of legacy C code to Rust. The goal is to achieve the same quality and style that a skilled Rust developer would produce, thereby eliminating the entire class of memory safety security vulnerabilities present in C programs. This program may involve novel combinations of software analysis, such as static analysis and dynamic analysis, and machine learning techniques like large language models.

Highlights from the forum thread:

There's even a conspiracy theory that the Rust Foundation's 501 organization type was chosen so it can conduct lobbying. The implication being that the Rust Foundation is behind government recommendations to move toward memory safe languages. (Big Borrow-Checker, if you will).

Assuming a worst case scenario, this could be the worst thing to happen to Rust’s image. We end up with billions of lines of rewritten Rust code that is full of soundness and logic bugs, and that no one understands.

DARPA funds some projects on a "there is an infinitesimal chance of success, but if you succeed, it's a big deal" basis. Silent Talk is an example here - very unlikely to succeed, even at the beginning, but if you could hold a radio conversation without sound, that'd be a huge deal for special operations forces.

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[–] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I think this is an interesting idea. If they're able to pull it off, I think it will cement the usefulness of LLMs. I have my doubts, but it's worth trying. I'd imagine that the LLM is specially tuned to be more adept at this task. Your bog-standard GPT-4 or Claude will probably be unreliable.

[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Having built code converters for the same language to auto migrate to a later version of that language, I'm incredibly worried. We still had to manually verify every thing.

I'm hopeful though that this does become the wave of the future. There's some serious legacy shit out there that doesn't have enough of a financial gain to revisit and rewrite.

[–] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 5 points 3 months ago

Yeah, they'll probably have to check everything. Though, I wonder if even just checking that everything is good to go would save time from manually re-writing it all. While it may not be a smashing success, it could still prove useful.

I dunno, I'm interested to see how this plays out.