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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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[–] fubarx@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 months ago

I'vd tried multiple times to convert existing code or createnew ones using LLMs. The first attempts are OK, but once you start refining the prompts, they all go off-the-rails.

Most of the time, the generated code uses old or deprecated libraries or APIs. You point that out and they correct it. But a few iterations later, you're refining something else and the old, deprecated calls come back. Once again, you point it out and it gets corrected.

Forget trying to correct it yourself by hand, because now it's diverged from the LLM context. And this can happen in multiple places in the code. Rinse. Repeat.

At some point you just give up. Either it's wrong or it will be wrong in different ways later. You have to read through every line to find strange, divergent errors. Over and over. It gets exhausting.

At the end, it feels like maybe you could have done it faster and more quickly yourself, but the time has already been sunk.