Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR)

Post by cuu508 » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 5:47 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #236

m0llusk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinions about automated driving systems vary. Just from my own experience doing business all around San Francisco I have seen at least a half dozen instances of Waymo vehicles making unsafe maneuvers. Responders have told me and local government officials that Waymo vehicles frequently fail to acknowledge emergency situations or respond to driving instructions. Driving is a social exercise which requires understandi…

they're not perfect, sure, but they're out there, just driving around all autonomously and all, contrary to GGP's assertion that they don't exist.

Post by Animats » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:16 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #204

Animats wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried that thing. The Rust that comes out is terrible. It converts C into a set of Rust function calls which explicitly emulate C semantics by manipulating raw pointers. It doesn't even convert C arrays to a Vec. It's a brute-force transliteration, not a translation. I and someone else ran this on a JPEG 2000 decoder that sometimes crashed with a bad memory reference. The Rust version crashed with the same bad m…

It doesn't make sense to convert a C array to a Vec, the Vec type is a growable array but the C array isn't growable. It makes sense to convert to Rust's array type, which has a fixed size, and we realise there's a problem at API boundaries because C's arrays decay to pointers, so the moment we touch an API boundary all safety is destroyed.

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:34 AM UTC

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #28

mike_hearn wrote: post #10

That sounds ... hard. Especially as idiomatic Rust as written by skilled programmers looks nothing like C, and most interesting code is written in C++ anyway. Isn't it equivalent to statically determining the lifetimes of all allocations in the C program, including those that are implemented using custom allocators or which cross into proprietary libraries? There's been a lot of research into this sort of thing over…

Can't most c++ be machine-lowered to C?

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:38 AM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #42

childintime wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard for humans. But it's DARPA, is it hard for AI? Image classification used to be hard also, today cars drive themselves. I'd say it's good timing.

Well, Claude 3.5 can do translation from one language to another in a fairly competent manner if the languages are close enough. I've used it for that task myself with success (Java -> JavaScript). But, this isn't just about rewriting code from one language to another. It's about reverse engineering complex information out of the code, which may not be immediately visible in it, and then finding a way to make it "saf…

Post by superb_dev » Wed, Jul 31, 2024, 6:50 AM UTC

PreInternet01 wrote: post #94

steveklabnik wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is a core design tenet of the language. It's as benign a statement as "C# has garbage collection." That's not "reluctant to offer compromise."

OK, you truly seem not to understand how much damage you're dealing to the general population using absolutist statements like this, do you? Nor do you seem to understand "compromise", like at all , because you seem to equate it with "tit for that", which is unsurprising, but still... disappointing. In any case, I'm truly done here, in all senses of the word, but I still I wish you and your acolytes the absolute best…