Tag: c2rust

The C2Rust project shows that most C code can be converted into something that is technically Rust. That is not to say that we’ve exhausted all opportunities for automation; far from it. What we can do today is making syntactic changes. The structure of the program is preserved including the way memory is managed. Therefore, the Rust output is as unsafe as the input C. To take advantage of Rust’s type system, we must also make semantic changes so the code comports with Rust’s ownership-based model which is how we enforce memory safety.

This post explores how the current output of the C2Rust translator can be further hardened. Most blog posts on porting C code to Rust rely on human intelligence. The goal here is to explore the smallest set of changes we can make to get to safe Rust without a human in the loop. The idea is that the simpler the changes, the greater the odds that we can automate them.

The Rust-loving team at Immunant has been hard at work on C2Rust, a migration framework that takes the drudgery out of migrating to Rust. Our goal is to make safety improvements to the translated Rust automatically where we can, and help the programmer do the same where we cannot. First, however, we have to build a rock-solid translator that gets people up and running in Rust. Testing on small CLI programs gets old eventually, so we decided to try translating Quake 3 into Rust. After a couple of days, we were likely the first people to ever play Quake3 in Rust!

Producing readable, idiomatic Rust code is a major goal of C2Rust, our project to accelerate migration of C code into Rust. One hurdle we faced is the mismatch between C headers and the Rust module system. C and Rust are similar in many ways: they're both performance oriented languages with explicit memory management and full control over every aspect of the system. Rust's module system is a huge improvement over C header files. Modules declare an interface of type declarations and functions for other modules to use. In contrast, C has no such modern conveniences, so declarations must be duplicated in each source file. If C2Rust is going to produce reasonable Rust code, we have to bridge that gap by de-duplicating and merging declarations across modules.

Our goal in the C2Rust project is to translate any valid C99 program into equivalent Rust code. Naturally, this means we need to properly support translating C variadic functions into Rust. For a long time, the Rust-C FFI only allowed one-way calls to C variadic functions: Rust code could call C variadic functions, but not the other way around. Rust RFC 2137 proposed an interface for Rust code to provide C-compatible variadic functions, which was later implemented as a series of patches by Dan Robertson that have been merged into nightly Rust from November 2018 to February 2019.