c2rust VS json-c

A recent practical example of the former: the fish shell re-wrote incrementally from C++ to Rust, and is almost finished https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

An example of the latter: c2rust, which is a work in progress but is very impressive https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

It currently translates into unsafe Rust, but the strategy is to separate the "compile C to unsafe Rust" steps and the "compile unsafe Rust to safe Rust" steps. As I see it, as it makes the overall task simpler, allows for more user freedom, and makes the latter potentially useful even for non-transpiled code. https://immunant.com/blog/2023/03/lifting/

> The date at the bottom of the article is 2022-06-13. Has there been further progress?

The article links to their github repo:

https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

There's commits in the last hour, so at least some signal of life.

This is arguably already the state of things.

Rust might get compiled down through MIR, down through LLVM IR, down to assembly or wasm... which then might be JIT or AOT (re)compiled into other bytecodes... which might perhaps be decompiled back up to C... and C might be retranslated back to horrific unsafe-spamming Rust by the likes of https://c2rust.com/. We've come full circle!

The main issue is that retranslating high level languages into other high level languages isn't something that there's actually a lot of demand for, especially commercially, especially given the N x M translation matrix going on. So a lot of the projects "stabilize" (get abandoned). And automatically translating between the idioms of those languages gets even nastier in terms of matrix bloat.

Well, you've got stuff like MSIL and JVM bytecodes which are higher level, and preserve more type information, and can be compiled to / decompiled from while still preserving more structure, but they still form competing incompatible ecosystems.

That's the wrong direction. What's needed are intelligent converters which convert less-strict languages to more-strict ones.

Non-intelligent converters just make a mess. Here's c2rust.[1]

Classic C++ to modern C++, plus a compiler flag to lock out all the old unsafe stuff, would be an achievement.

[1] https://c2rust.com/

Well, technically, it's not hard to build such data structures. If you are willing to liberally use raw pointers, UnsafeCell, MaybeUninit and ManuallyDrop, then you can more-or-less write C-equivalent code in unsafe Rust. (there are even transpilers from C to Rust)

In the chart at [1], this step is represented by a magic wand.

(I wanted to give some examples, but https://c2rust.com/ seems to not be translating today.)

[1] https://c2rust.com/manual/

There are some tools specific to some transformations at least:

https://c2rust.com/

I expect that is because you're not particularly familiar with either LLVM or Rust, considering C can literally be transpiled to Rust.

When you say .jsonc, do you mean JSONC, JSONC, or JSONC? And have I mentioned JSON-C?

If you want a comfortable developer experience without having to "develop standard functionality," choose another language.

Otherwise: libcurl for the requests, json-c[0] for the JSON handling. SDL for window handling/events/other glue stuff. I don't know what rocksdb is but I assume it has its own C API library.

[0]https://github.com/json-c/json-c

There’s also json-c and Hjson.

Look for the instructions here: https://github.com/json-c/json-c

There are a few libraries out there for doing it. I like json-c but there are others.

git clone https://github.com/json-c/json-c mkdir json-c-build cd json-c-build cmake ../json-c make And link json-c-build folder to sway's meson build file.

It seems json-c uses a random number generator to get a seed that it then uses for string hashing. This is one way of protecting yourself against hash denial-of-service attacks.

https://github.com/json-c/json-c/blob/df27756491abf9ecce648c...