3 ms·

Yeah, I suppose the larger challenge is how to convert unsafe C to safe Rust.

• Animats 9y ago
  Most of the problems revolve around "how big is it". (The three big problems in C are "how big is it", "who owns it", and "who locks it". C has no language constructs for any of those, while Rust does.) If a C program works at all, there has to be some computable expression for the length of a C array. Code that uses an array passed as a pointer has to know how big the array is, even though C lacks a language construct for this. The problem is finding that expression. For many cases, it can be automatically inferred, especially if you have cross-module analysis and can see where the original array came from. I once proposed an extension to C to allow expressing array size information.[1] Discussions indicated it was technically sound but politically too much trouble. It gives a hint, though, of how to approach size information in C. Instead of int read(int fd, char buf[], size_t len); one would write int read(int fd, char& buf[len], size_t len); Same generated code for the call, but now the source code contains size information, which could be used for subscript checking by the caller and callee. A serious C to Rust converter needs to be able to detect relationships like that. It doesn't have to be 100% automatic. If the converter could knock off most of the easy cases (especially those involving strings), and accept hints on the hard ones, it could be usable. [1] http://www.animats.com/papers/languages/safearraysforc43.pdf http://www.animats.com/papers/languages/safearraysforc43.pdf