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Canonical is Funding a PhD to Automate C to Rust Translation for Ubuntu (itsfoss.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] 44 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I always feel like the much bigger challenge is whether anyone can still maintain the codebase afterwards. You throw away so much institutional knowledge by doing a conversion like this...

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  • [–] 22 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    You don't just convert and sleep though. You convert and prune. You slowly rework parts post-conversion to use more sensible approaches/libraries. It's not a one-and-done operation, it's an ongoing thing that they judge the cost of investing in now is less than the long term maintaining C Ubuntu.

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    • [–] 58 points 2 months ago* (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 47 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    If they're translating GPL code to Rust, doesn't that constitute a derived work and require the resulting code to be GPL licenced too?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, pretty sure rote translations of the same logic into a different language is considered a derivative work. This is why companies making their own version of copyrighted software often take a “clean room” approach to cover their asses where different people study the existing software and write the spec than the people implementing the spec.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Wow! What an observant smart thought.

    Well, except for the fact that code conversion doesn't give you the permission to change licenses or remove copyright. And the small matter of fact that both projects mentioned are Canonical projects, where whatever code that is not directly copyrighted by Canonical, is contributed by someone who signed an agreement with this stipulation:

    (b) To the maximum extent permitted by the relevant law, You grant to Us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, irrevocable licence under the Copyright covering the Contribution, with the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees, to reproduce, modify, display, perform and distribute the Contribution as part of the Material; provided that this license is conditioned upon compliance with Section 2.3.

    "Us" being Canonical of course. So they could actually "re-license" the projects right now, without changing a single line of code.

    It's always astonishing how condiment in their ignorance people are when it comes to these matters.

    You geniuses are getting too predictable with your ignorance.

    I literally wrote what's quoted above yesterday replying to someone else.

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    • [–] [S] 6 points 2 months ago

    1. Microsoft ships Ubuntu through WSL

    2. Canonical is rewriting Ubuntu in Rust

    3. Neither Canonical nor Rust are shy of permissive (re) licensing.

    4. ???

    5. Profit

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    [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    They haven't got rust-utils or rust Sudo working yet.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    coreutils ships with Ubunutu 26.04, albeit with a number of caveats.

    Package: rust-coreutils 
Version: 0.8.0-0ubuntu3 
Priority: required 
Section: utils 
Origin: Ubuntu 
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com> 
Original-Maintainer: Debian Rust Maintainers <pkg-rust-maintainers@alioth-lists.debian.net> 
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug 
Installed-Size: 16.0 MB 
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.43), libgcc-s1 (>= 4.2), libselinux1 (>= 3.1~) 
Conflicts: coreutils-from-uutils (<< 0.0.0~ubuntu22~) 
Homepage: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils 
Task: minimal 
Download-Size: 4,235 kB 
APT-Manual-Installed: no 
APT-Sources: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu resolute/main amd64 Packages 
Description: Universal coreutils utils, written in Rust 
 This packages replaces the GNU coreutils package written in C. 
 It should be a drop-in replacement but: 
  Some options have NOT been implemented, 
  Might have important bugs, 
  Might be slower, 
  Output of the binaries might be slightly different.
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    • [–] [S] 9 points 2 months ago

    Complete article: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/investing-in-automated-c-to-rust-translation/86369

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    [–] -1 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I don't get why the rust cult mist always convert something from C to rust. Why not just make new software in rust and leave the stuff that works alone?

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