ferros VS c2rust

My company, https://www.auxon.io. We created https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros originally to enable a customer project early in the company's life cycle.

Some time later we had another customer interested in using it and having us add some features to it (e.g. some device drivers and a persistence layer utilizing https://docs.rs/tickv/latest/tickv/). It was becoming a massive pain in the neck to work out source code sharing agreements with them, so we decided to just open source it.

There are quite a number of things that we would do differently if we had to build it again, and at some point will likely do that work to revise it. The biggest one of those is root task synthesis. The other is to build and bring in facilities for running tasks that are compiled to WASM.

When we add WASM support to https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros it'll sorta be like what you're angling at there in your description.

We've built things on seL4 (https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros). We like to joke that it's the most perfect piece of nearly featureless software ever made.

There's... A LOT... of work to do before seL4 is going to be anywhere near usability parity with something like Linux, unfortunately.

Rather than make a general purpose OS, we decided to use it more like a unikernel or "library OS" where you're trying to make a well defined kind of "appliance" image to deploy to specific hardware rather than try to fake being a POSIX-y shaped OS.

For what it's worth, here's FerrOS's repo as well as the underlying selfe repo

That's basically what we did with https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros, Bundle Rust programs together as tasks to run atop the formally verified seL4 microkernel.

We also built a Rust framework called FerrOS (https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros) atop the formally-verified seL4 microkernel.

It has a similar set of usage idioms to Hubris it looks like in terms of trying to setup as much as possible ahead of time to assemble what's kind of an application specific operating system where everything your use case needs is assembled at build-time as a bunch of communicating tasks running on seL4.

We recently added a concise little persistence interface that pulls in TicKV (https://docs.tockos.org/tickv/index.html) from the Tock project you referenced above, and some provisions are being added for some more dynamic task handling based on some asks from an automotive OEM.

We built a thing to enable combining Rust applications together to be hosted on the seL4 microkernel. The developer experience is more akin to that of something like an RTOS where the OS and your applications are built and deployed together. The whole premise of it is decidedly non-POSIX-like. The current point is for assembling software for use-case-specific/appliance computing, not general purpose computing. (https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros)

We're looking both for contributors and also actively hiring for a couple engineering positions for the above and for or mainline product.

I tried and failed to bring unikernels to my former work when I was at Visa. Specifically, LING.

At my current company, Auxon, we recently open sourced[1] some work we did a couple years back which is more or less an attempt at the basic foundations for blending the seL4 microkernel with fairly normal no_std Rust application development and assembling them all together to make a purpose built OS/application to deploy directly to hardware or within a VM. We have some work to do to keep building it up as a foundation for broader use, but we're looking into partnering with the seL4 Foundation (now under the Linux Foundation) to iterate on it further with some of our other mutual partners. The developer experience is much closer to that of developing for an RTOS than it is like typical general purpose computing development.

I'm of course biased, but I think there's a lot of room to innovate in the space of use case specific software stacks where the domain and constraints are well understood and too many degrees of freedom are actually a hindrance and a liability, not an advantage.

[1] https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros

On top of that is ferros (no relation to to ferrous-systems), a higher-level userland of unreasonably strong types for compile-time resource tracking. No more discovering you need more memory, or capability slots or IPC rights at runtime. These types help you fit the right seL4 screw to the right seL4 screwdriver.

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