Translating C To Rust: Lessons from a User Study

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14174v1
• Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2024 14:37:05 GMT
• Title: Translating C To Rust: Lessons from a User Study
• Authors: Ruishi Li, Bo Wang, Tianyu Li, Prateek Saxena, Ashish Kundu,
• Abstract summary: Rust aims to offer full memory safety for programs, a guarantee that untamed C programs do not enjoy. We report on a user study asking humans to translate real-world C programs to Rust. Our participants are able to produce safe Rust translations, whereas state-of-the-art automatic tools are not able to do so.
• Score: 12.49361031696427
• License:
• Abstract: Rust aims to offer full memory safety for programs, a guarantee that untamed C programs do not enjoy. How difficult is it to translate existing C code to Rust? To get a complementary view from that of automatic C to Rust translators, we report on a user study asking humans to translate real-world C programs to Rust. Our participants are able to produce safe Rust translations, whereas state-of-the-art automatic tools are not able to do so. Our analysis highlights that the high-level strategy taken by users departs significantly from those of automatic tools we study. We also find that users often choose zero-cost (static) abstractions for temporal safety, which addresses a predominant component of runtime costs in other full memory safety defenses. User-provided translations showcase a rich landscape of specialized strategies to translate the same C program in different ways to safe Rust, which future automatic translators can consider.

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