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.
IMO this rust shit is just an attempt to convert a GPL licensed ecosystem into the Corpo-CHUD preferred MIT license.
Just like with Clang, the Corpo is simply intolerably offended by being asked to contribute back to the community.
Using Rust in no way requires the usage of pushover licenses. While it’s true that many devs are using pushover licenses, there are plenty of GPL Rust projects. You are just focusing on the sensationalized ones that get mentioned in news cycles.
- AGPL Rust projects on GitHub
- GPL Rust projects on GitHub
- Unfortunately, Codeberg doesn’t support filtering by license, but there are Rust projects on Codeberg, some of which will use copyleft licenses here.
- GNOME’s GitLab is also rife with GPL-licensed Rust projects.
It doesn’t require, but they use rust as an excuse to do that. Ubuntu’s attempts at rust rewrite was all license change iirc.
