Investing in automated C to Rust translation

This article was originally posted on the Ubuntu Discourse, and is reposted here. I welcome comments and further discussion in that thread. I have written before about the role that Rust will play in Ubuntu’s future. The case for Rust in 2026 is clear: it gives systems programmers more ergonomic control over performance and resource use while eliminating many classes of memory-safety defects, making it especially useful for software operating at important security boundaries. The harder question is what to do about the enormous amount of mature C code that already exists? Rewrites have long been expensive and risky, and do not often materialise obvious improvements. Established codebases often contain years of bug fixes, compatibility decisions, operational knowledge and hard-won performance optimisations. Our approach to modernisation in Ubuntu has been forward-looking, but pragmatic. The new technologies we’ve adopted have earned their place in Ubuntu. The uutils coreutils project…