I've used my homebrew c2rust converter[1] to translate lodepng and pngquant[2] libraries to Rust. My two key takeaways are: Good test coverage is essential for

I've used my homebrew c2rust converter[1] to translate lodepng and pngquant[2] libraries to Rust. My two key takeaways are: Good test coverage is essential for this. Count how many bugs you've written when you were writing this code for the first time. Even if your bug-rate is 99% better during the rewrite, that may still be a significant number. Fine-grained tests aren't necessary, but end-to-end tests that touch every feature are crucial to catch regressions. Once the rough conversion is done, it is necessary to refactor the code to take advantage of Rust's idioms to get safety benefits. Just 1:1 conversion is underwhelming, and it feels like replacing gcc with rustc. I did not realize just how recklessly pointer-heavy C tends to be until I saw it through Rusty lens. The lodepng conversion was "meh". It's a good C code, but its structure was very different from what you'd do in Rust (e.g. Rust prefers generics over pointer casts, iterators over indexing or pointer arithmetic, has interfaces for steaming processing that C lacks). I don't know how far I can refactor the code to Rusty idioms and still call it lodepng :) OTOH the pngquant codebase was mine, and I'm happy with the results. When converting I took advantage of Rust idioms, and the Rust version is nicer to maintain and even a bit faster. [1]: https://lib.rs/crates/citrus https://lib.rs/crates/citrus [2]: https://pngquant.org/rust.html https://pngquant.org/rust.html