A lot of these kinds of routines could be translated to other languages but aren't because they are complex and often unmaintained and no one is really around t

A lot of these kinds of routines could be translated to other languages but aren't because they are complex and often unmaintained and no one is really around that understands them well enough to port them to C or Rust or whatever. There is also the issue that often they were published before adding a LICENSE file was a thing. I've found myself in the position before of having to email professors in some random university to ask them if I can get permission to redistribute such a routine while packaging a library that depended on it. In one case I asked them if it would be possible to update their code with a license (which was just a zip file on netlib) and the answer was, "no, but you have my email". So I found myself having to write something like "distributed with permission from the author, private correspondence, pinky swear" in my copyright file. some of this code is so old the authors aren't around and it would get "lost" in terms of being able to get permissions to use it, I mean it's a potential crisis to be honest, if people really cared to check. (Until the copyrights expire I guess, which is what, 70 years after the author's death or some such?) Anyway, I wonder if a potential solution is to autotranslate some of these libraries using LLMs? Maybe AI will save us in the end. Of course you can't trust LLMs so you still need to understand the code well enough to verify any such translation.