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> You can very much translate C to Rust on a function-by-function basis, the only issue is at the boundary Absolutely not. There are many restrictions of Rust

> You can very much translate C to Rust on a function-by-function basis, the only issue is at the boundary Absolutely not. There are many restrictions of Rust that will prevent that. Lifetimes, global state come to mind first. Think about returning pointer to some owned by the caller - this can require massive cascading changes all over the codebase to be fixed.

zozbot234 1y ago
These are restrictions of idiomatic Safe Rust. You can use either unsafe Rust or, in many cases, less idiomatic but still Safe Rust to sidestep them. (For instance, "aliasable mutable" but otherwise valid references which can often be expressed as &Cell<T>, etc.) You might still need a "massive cascading change" later on to make the code properly idiomatic once you have Rust on both sides of the boundary, but that's just a one-time thing and quite manageable.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  unsafe rust still has to follow invariants, you're just promising the compiler that it does
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    Yes, clearly it's a matter of using different facilities that may only be accessible to Unsafe Rust, and changing the interface accordingly. But to state that Rust as a whole has such restrictions is not correct.
- pizza234 1y ago
  > You can use either unsafe Rust or, in many cases, less idiomatic but still Safe Rust to sidestep them. (For instance, "aliasable mutable" but otherwise valid references which can often be expressed as &Cell<T>, etc.) There's no doubt that one can convert C into unsafe Rust - C2Rust can automatically convert an entire C codebase into unsafe Rust The problem is that after such step (which is certainly valuable), converting the code to safe Rust is typically a lot of work, which is the point of the academic research in question. Half baked code, using safety workarounds, doesn't provide any value to a project.

zozbot234 1y ago

These are restrictions of idiomatic Safe Rust. You can use either unsafe Rust or, in many cases, less idiomatic but still Safe Rust to sidestep them. (For instance, "aliasable mutable" but otherwise valid references which can often be expressed as &Cell<T>, etc.) You might still need a "massive cascading change" later on to make the code properly idiomatic once you have Rust on both sides of the boundary, but that's just a one-time thing and quite manageable.

adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
unsafe rust still has to follow invariants, you're just promising the compiler that it does
- zozbot234 1y ago
  Yes, clearly it's a matter of using different facilities that may only be accessible to Unsafe Rust, and changing the interface accordingly. But to state that Rust as a whole has such restrictions is not correct.
pizza234 1y ago
> You can use either unsafe Rust or, in many cases, less idiomatic but still Safe Rust to sidestep them. (For instance, "aliasable mutable" but otherwise valid references which can often be expressed as &Cell<T>, etc.) There's no doubt that one can convert C into unsafe Rust - C2Rust can automatically convert an entire C codebase into unsafe Rust The problem is that after such step (which is certainly valuable), converting the code to safe Rust is typically a lot of work, which is the point of the academic research in question. Half baked code, using safety workarounds, doesn't provide any value to a project.