Programming

17358 readers

289 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

206

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course (www.theregister.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

61 comments fedilink hide all child comments

To accelerate the transition to memory safe programming languages, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is driving the development of TRACTOR, a programmatic code conversion vehicle.

The term stands for TRanslating All C TO Rust. It's a DARPA project that aims to develop machine-learning tools that can automate the conversion of legacy C code into Rust.

The reason to do so is memory safety. Memory safety bugs, such buffer overflows, account for the majority of major vulnerabilities in large codebases. And DARPA's hope is that AI models can help with the programming language translation, in order to make software more secure.

"You can go to any of the LLM websites, start chatting with one of the AI chatbots, and all you need to say is 'here's some C code, please translate it to safe idiomatic Rust code,' cut, paste, and something comes out, and it's often very good, but not always," said Dan Wallach, DARPA program manager for TRACTOR, in a statement.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago

so-called AI

knows its own limits

frustration noises It knows nothing! It's not intelligent. It doesn't understand anything. Attempts to keep those things acting within expected/desired lines fail constantly, and not always due to malice. This project's concept reeks of laziness and trend-following. Instead of a futile effort to make a text generator reliably produce either an error or correct code, they should perhaps put that effort into writing a transpiler built on knowable, understandable rules. ... Oh, and just hire a damn Rust dev. They're climbing up the walls looking to Rust-ify everything, just let them do it.