Jamey Sharp On Whether You Should Translate Your Code To Rust

Often times whenever mentioning a new security vulnerability in any piece of open-source/Linux software, it generally gets brought up in our forums "they should write that software in Rust" or similar comments about how XYZ project should see a rewrite in Rust for its memory-safety features. But is it really worthwhile porting your codebase to Rust?

Jamey Sharp, the long-time open-source developer known for his X.Org contributions and recently developing Corrode as a way to translate C code into Rust code, has written a lengthy blog post about the subject of whether it's worth it to translate -- and hopefully with somewhat automated assistance of Corrode -- push your project into Rustlang.

Sharp feels that rewriting existing software in Rust is always a great educational exercise if wishing to learn Rust, if wanting upstream to use the Rust version of a program there really needs to be strong evidence that it's better and at least equivalent to the original code, and that it's justifiable if there is community support and translating to Rust would be more worthwhile than fixing the original bugs for issues like memory safety that Rust addresses.

If you're looking for more information on Jamey's thoughts about switching a code-base over to Rust, you can read his thoughts via this blog post. Those wanting to learn more about his automated C to Rust translator can stop by the GitHub project site.