doc VS c2rust

* list of list literals (1,2; 3,4) eqv ((1,2), (3,4));

to paraphrase Larry Walk “everyone wants the [semi] colon”

https://docs.raku.org/

amen to this … i recommend thinking about your problem in terms of effective data structures and then apply even a very simple DSL to handle access and transformations … fwiw the built in Grammars and Slang support in raku https://docs.raku.org are fantastic tools for this job.

When I was looking at the language, I didn't find the documentation "really poor". In fact I was impressed at how much of a one-stop-shop the official docs site was for both conceptual docs and API docs.

https://docs.raku.org/

The Raku Programming Language documentation already contains most (if not all) the documentation you need to deal with the issues you will confront in migrating Perl code to Raku. But, as documentation goes, the focus is on the factual differences. These blogs will try to go a little more in-depth about specific issues and provide a little more hands-on information based on my experience porting quite a lot of Perl code to Raku.

I will start working on the new version of Pod as a branch in https://github.com/raku/doc.

Well, performance has been improved by several orders of magnitude since the first release. So maybe it's time to look at https://raku.org again (or first have a look at its new documentation site https://docs.raku.org)

go to https://docs.raku.org/ and type "IO" into the search field. Behold the list that appears. Check out IO::Path or IO::Handle or whatever looks interesting. Maybe it's just me but I go "Ooh, look at all the things!".

Related: The Raku documentation does an excellent job explaining hashes/dictrionaries/associative arrays. If you've any issues, please submit a Github issue.

Raku has a lot of syntax. My first attempt at learning the language failed because I couldn't get past all the strange syntax I saw at https://docs.raku.org/. Sometimes I didn't know what the syntax was called, so I didn't know what to search for.

In the course of figuring this out, I realized that our docs also (slightly) misstate what \d means in a Regex, which led to this PR. So thanks for bringing all this up!

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/

But not all transpilers are between languages where at least one of them is designed to be transpiled. For example, c2rust can transpile, as the name suggests, C to (ugly, unsafe) Rust. A while ago there was a Java -> C compiler in GCC (GCJ), but it's pretty out of date now.

I do not know about your specific issue but you may be interested by https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

You should also consider using C2Rust (they're even working on C -> safe Rust translation)

> 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)

/uj This transpiles from C to unsafe Rust using an existing tool, then strips the unsafe keyword from the generated function signatures