This sounds cool in theory, but would be extremely hard to pull off in any kind of meaningful fashion I think simply because Rust is just too different from C. You can probably make something to very roughly "transpile" C to Rust, but the Rust code that is generated probably wouldn't be good and will probably be a pain to work with simply because it'd end up being a mess and at that point, if you're going to have to end up refactoring a ton of generated code, you may as well just rewrite it yourself so it is actually half decent code.

unsafe everywhere

us military to run C code through chatGPT to get rust code

recent breakthroughs in machine learning techniques, like large language models (LLMs), have created an environment that may lend itself to a new class of solutions.

DARPA’s Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR) program wants to seize this opportunity by substantially automating the translation of the world’s legacy C code to Rust.

“You can go to any of the LLM websites, start chatting with one of the AI chatbots, and all you need to say is ‘here's some C code, please translate it to safe idiomatic Rust code,’ cut, paste, and something comes out, and it's often very good

Just write everything in java and run the OS on the JVM

Unlimited memory safety vulnerabilities on the first world!

Critical support for automated generation of garbage code for American military.

I do kinda like the idea of using CHERI to run all this C code with memory safety properties enforced by hardware instead of rewriting it all in rust, but whatever either works

I actually find Rust pretty OK. The only things that I don't like about Rust is its quirky syntax. And its primitive implementation of OOP. And its compiler. And cargo. And the ecosystem...

OK well maybe I don't find Rust actually OK. Why did we have to invent a whole new language if we could improve standards and compilers for existing languages?

instead of using pooled resources to create a new program which would educate and gainfully employ thousands or tens of thousands (idk how big a task this is as I'm tech illiterate but I'm blindly assuming its on the scale of the US national highway system when first implemented) they're going to use a robot to make bad code

capitalism is very efficient

Instead of mass translating C code in some insane ready-to-ruin codebases project, why not just.. make a compiler that addresses the vulnerabilities?

So are they gonna stop using Linux or try to do this with the kernel?