Translating C To Rust: Lessons from a User Study
| Autor: | Li, Ruishi, Wang, Bo, Li, Tianyu, Saxena, Prateek, Kundu, Ashish |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2024 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.14722/ndss.2025.241407 |
| Popis: | 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. Comment: Accepted by NDSS Symposium 2025. Please cite the conference version of this paper, e.g., "Ruishi Li, Bo Wang, Tianyu Li, Prateek Saxena, Ashish Kundu. Translating C To Rust: Lessons from a User Study. In 32nd Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2025)." |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
| Externí odkaz: |
|