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Canonical and UK Research and Innovation fund PhD research to automate C to Rust translation

A three-year doctoral project at the University of Bristol aims to convert large C codebases into safe, maintainable Rust.

The short version

  • Canonical and UK Research and Innovation are co-funding a three-year doctoral research project at the University of Bristol.
  • The initiative focuses on developing an automated platform to translate large-scale C repositories into safe and maintainable Rust code.
  • PhD student Alex Wood will conduct the research under academic and industry supervision over the next three years.

Key facts

  • Canonical and UK Research and Innovation are co-funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group.[Slashdot]
  • The research goal is to create a platform capable of automatically translating C codebases containing hundreds of thousands of lines into safe, behaviourally correct, and maintainable Rust.[Slashdot]
  • The project will be undertaken by PhD student Alex Wood, led by Professor Meng Wang, with co-supervision from Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager.[Slashdot]

What remains uncertain

  • The exact monetary value of the funding from Canonical and UK Research and Innovation was not disclosed.[Slashdot]

Sources