Corrode Is Still Advancing For Auto-Translating C Code To Rust

Written by Michael Larabel in Programming on 5 February 2017 at 10:27 AM EST. 1 Comment
PROGRAMMING
Free software developer Jamey Sharp continues working on his "Corrode" project for being able to automatically convert C code into Rust.

Corrode is all about converting C code to Rust, largely to migrate large, legacy code-bases over to Rust, which is known for its memory safety features and other benefits of a modern programming language. But Jamey Sharp does agree that not all C projects should turn to Rust but in cases like the CVS code-base, he continues to believe it's much better off (and safer) in Rust.

Jamey presented at this weekend's FOSDEM 2016 conference about Corrode and some notable projects using Rust like Firefox, GNOME's librsvg that recently began making use of some Rust code, Remacs as Emacs implemented in Rust, Rusl as Musl libc in Rust, and a Coreutils port to Rust. Corrode won't necessarily make all of your auto-written Rust code safe, but Jamey argues, that it's "easier to refactor safe Rust from unsafe Rust than from C."

Among the areas of the Corrode code that aren't yet perfect is control flow handling (Rust lacks a C-style goto or switch capability), some areas of C aren't yet supported some features like bit-fields and variable length arrays aren't yet present in Rust, and replacing of raw pointers in C code.

Those interested in converting C code into Rustlang can learn more about the Corrode effort via Jamey's slides from FOSDEM 2017 while the video should soon be available. Corrode remains hosted on GitHub.
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