As part of the collaboration between Canonical and the University of Bristol, the project will target AppArmor and snap-confine as industrial case studies. Both are critical to Ubuntu’s security posture, and provide a substantially harder test than isolated translation examples. They will help us evaluate whether the techniques can cope with the structure and constraints of mature production software.
Note that this is not a commitment to replace AppArmor or snap-confine with what is generated, rather that we have a vested interest in the software and are keen to see the results.
The most optimistic outcome would be a system capable of translating substantial C repositories into Rust with strong evidence of behavioural equivalence and relatively little manual intervention. The research could also produce better methods for decomposing repositories, stronger validation techniques, reusable translation datasets, improved program-repair tools and a more precise understanding of where automated migration stops being reliable.
I always feel like the much bigger challenge is whether anyone can still maintain the codebase afterwards. You throw away so much institutional knowledge by doing a conversion like this…
You don’t just convert and sleep though. You convert and prune. You slowly rework parts post-conversion to use more sensible approaches/libraries. It’s not a one-and-done operation, it’s an ongoing thing that they judge the cost of investing in now is less than the long term maintaining C Ubuntu.
Well the issue is the chosen person is going to be automating the process, not doing it by hand, so there is no refactoring going on.
Look at the folks in college right now, no one can or will.