Ownership guided C to Rust translation ...

• Main Authors: Zhang, Hanliang, David, Cristina, Yu, Yijun, Wang, Meng
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2023
• Subjects: Programming Languages cs.PL; Software Engineering cs.SE; FOS Computer and information sciences; The Pointers
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2303.10515; https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10515

Dubbed a safer C, Rust is a modern programming language that combines memory safety and low-level control. This interesting combination has made Rust very popular among developers and there is a growing trend of migrating legacy codebases (very often in C) to Rust. In this paper, we present a C to Rust translation approach centred around static ownership analysis. We design a suite of analyses that infer ownership models of C pointers and automatically translate the pointers into safe Rust equivalents. The resulting tool, Crown, scales to real-world codebases (half a million lines of code in less than 10 seconds) and achieves a high conversion rate. ...