Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

Canonical is Funding a PhD to Automate C to Rust Translation

read original more articles
Why This Matters

Canonical's funding of a PhD project to automate the translation of large C codebases into Rust signifies a major step towards improving software safety, maintainability, and modernization. This initiative could streamline the migration process for legacy systems, making it easier for developers to adopt Rust's safety features. The project highlights the industry's growing focus on leveraging automation and research to enhance software development practices.

Key Takeaways

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog It's FOSS:

Canonical has committed funding to a three-year PhD project focused on building a system that can automatically translate large C codebases into Rust. And they are not alone; UK Research and Innovation is matching their funding for the project, which is set to run through the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group.

The PhD is aiming to build an all-encompassing platform that can take a C repository running into hundreds of thousands of lines and translate it into Rust that's "safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust."

The work will be carried out by a student, Alex Wood, who will be supported by Professor Meng Wang leading the work, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager serving as co-supervisors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.