It's good to see DARPA pushing on this. It's a hard problem, but by no means impossible. Translating to safe Rust, though, is going to be really tough. There's a C to Rust translator now, but what comes out is horrible Rust, which just rewrites C pointer manipulation as unsafe Rust struct manipulation. The result is less maintainable than the original.
So what would it take to actually do this right? The two big problems are 1) array sizes, and 2) non-affine pointer usage. Pointer arithmetic is also hard, but rare. Most pointer arithmetic can be expressed as slices.
Every array in C has a size. It's just that the compiler doesn't know what it is.
So what would it take to actually do this right? The two big problems are 1) array sizes, and 2) non-affine pointer usage. Pointer arithmetic is also hard, but rare. Most pointer arithmetic can be expressed as slices.
Every array in C has a size. It's just that the compiler doesn't know what it is.
Where is this being discussed in detail?