Canonical, Bristol Fund 3-Year PhD to Translate 100,000s of C Lines Into Rust
Updated
Updated · InfoWorld · Aug 20
Canonical, Bristol Fund 3-Year PhD to Translate 100,000s of C Lines Into Rust
3 articles · Updated · InfoWorld · Aug 20
Summary
A three-year PhD project backed by Canonical, the University of Bristol and UK Research and Innovation will build a platform to convert hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy C code into Rust.
Canonical says the push targets a core obstacle in Ubuntu’s Rust shift: large C codebases are costly and risky to rewrite, yet memory-safe replacements are increasingly important for security-sensitive software.
The system will combine LLMs with conventional program analysis, splitting repositories into context-rich chunks, generating Rust, validating behavioral equivalence with the C source, and repairing detected issues.
AppArmor and snap-confine will serve as case studies, though Canonical said the research is not a commitment to replace either Ubuntu security component with machine-generated code.
Professor Meng Wang will lead the work with PhD student Alex Wood, aiming for a tool that can migrate substantial C repositories with limited manual intervention and stronger proof the translated code behaves the same.