[Cryptography] Ada vs Rust vs safer C
Kent Borg
kentborg at borg.org
Sat Sep 17 14:36:34 EDT 2016
[Jamey: A thread on the moderated Cryptography List is talking about the
dangers of C, and Rust comes up, and I am now mentioning your Corrode
project--so I added you to the CC. Hope that's okay. The thread might be
getting long-in-the tooth, so this might just end up being an FYI. -kb]
On 09/16/2016 06:46 PM, Alfie John wrote:
> Having made safe-C, you're still going to have that same mammoth
> effort to upgrade to unsafe-C, as it's essentially a new language. So
> if you're going to move to a new language, why duplicate effort?
> Rust... It comes without footguns.
There is at least one (seems active) project, "Corrode", to
automagically convert C code to Rust.
https://github.com/jameysharp/corrode
The developer, Jamey Sharp, seems to think it could be useful. From my
ignorant position I fear the output is going to range from horrible to
won't-compile. Maybe it would be a good starting point in porting old
code. Turning its output into "real" Rust code could be a lot of work,
but it might easier than starting from scratch: a way of checking you
have reproduced all the feature points (and figured out which of them
are actually bugs to be discarded).
If one of the "features" of C is its latent bugs, then, though a
mechanical translation might eliminate segfaults, it seems the bugs will
still be in any faithful translation. Maybe the biggest benefit would
see where the C code is too groady to translate at all--might be a lot
of code.
-kb
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