Canonical backs quest to translate mountains of C into safe Rust with AI

Bungs banknotes at Bristol boffins to find out if mature code survives the machine

Canonical's fondness for AI and Rust is no secret. Now it is co-funding a three-year PhD project investigating whether the former can translate large C codebases into the latter.

Engineering veep Jon Seager announced the investment on Ubuntu's Discourse forum. The PhD project will be conducted at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group.

So don't panic. This is not an announcement that Canonical will turn the bots loose to rewrite all of Ubuntu as Rusty slop. (For a start, nobody can afford that many tokens.) Instead of burning dosh on bots, Canonical will pay a proto-boffin to spend several years investigating whether the idea can be made to work. That is welcome. In an industry overflowing with hype, the project should produce evidence about whether this approach can be useful.

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