Catacomb_ii-64k Alternatives

catacomb_ii-64k reviews and mentions

• Emitting Safer Rust with C2Rust
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2023

  Conditional to your definition of "serious", I did: https://github.com/64kramsystem/catacomb_ii-64k. I essentially don't do technical writing anymore (and I had the impression that this topic isn't generally considered interesting), however, my considerations are:

  1. there are three levels of refactoring: removing the extensive (unbearable, to be honest) boilerplate that C2Rust introduces; converting the design from C to safe Rust; convert the design from unidiomatic Rust to idiomatic

  2. as another poster pointed out, for non-trivial projects, writing refactoring tooling is a must (to remove the C2Rust boilerplate), in order to perform step 1

  3. design refactoring (step 3) difficulty depends on the source code design; the code I worked with was hard to refactor, as it was old (school), in particular, lots of globals; the difficulty was not caused by the conversion C<>Rust, rather, the typical freedoms that C gives and Rust doesn't (in other words, the very obvious design differences between C and Rust)

  4. regarding the code understanding, if one performs the translation in the three-steps mentioned in point 1, at the end of step 2, one has effectively a safe Rust codebase, "just" unidiomatic

  5. beside a few steps, I was able to perform a conversion in self-contained steps, which is very good news for this type of work. Even better, it's possible (but that's a niche case) to port an SDL project by using at the same time the C library and the Rust one!

  6. however, I can imagine projects like Wolfenstein 3d to be very hard, since it's hard to port memory allocators and similar

  99. most important of all: just converting to Rust will quickly (even immediately) find bugs in the source; I've found approximately four bugs in the source code, including one by Carmack!

  All in all, I find this tool great, but somebody needs to work on refactoring tools, and C2Rust's output must be improved in order to be found usable by the public.