Comment on DARPA: Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR)

IllNess@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• simple@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Translating entire codebases with LLMs? What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

  I also don’t see how it would ever be possible to directly translate C to Rust. They’re so fundamentally different that things are bound to not work the same.

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  • IllNess@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t even understand how they are going to get around the memory security they are doing this translation for. Watch them have to break the security features of Rust just to make certain programs work.

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    • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I would expect that's part of the point, if a C program can't be converted to a language that doesn't allow memory violations that probably indicates that there are execution pathways that result in memory violations.

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  • FaceDeer@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What could go wrong with using human programmers to convert it?

    If you're going to insist on perfection for something like this then you're probably never going to get anything done. Convert the program and then test and debug it just like you'd do with any newly written code. The idea is to make it easier to do that, not to make it so you don't have to do it at all.

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