Comment by munin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munin | Hacker News Reader

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It's good to set the record straight on the relationship between c2rust and corrode. I was wondering that myself. Galois should give some credit back - that's free for them. It sounds like an accident not to.

I'm sympathetic to the terms of a non-fundamental research program funded by DARPA. Easy street with that agency is to get designated as doing fundamental research. If you aren't at a university, that is an uphill battle that most prime contractors won't be willing to deal with.

However, the pre-pub regime is not impossible to live under. You'd have to do something like: have a private repo/branch where you do the work that's funded by DARPA, rebase constantly against the public branch, and send once a month public release request with a diff to merge into the public one. Probably after the first few months, the PM will come up with a way to streamline the process.

You lose some energy to friction, but your other option is to just not take the money at all, so it's a question of do you spend 80% of your time working on this project and 20% of your time dealing with administrative bullshit, or 0% of your time working on this project.

It's a choice that's given to many.

(I'm one of the contributors to c2rust.)

As harpocrates mentioned, we've been taken by surprise at the interest in the c2rust project. We've updated the website to acknowledge the inspiration we drew from Jamey's Corrode translator. Our apologies for not including the acknowledgments from day one!

I want to take the chance to mention that c2rust goes beyond transpiling C to (unsafe) Rust. We anticipate that even in the limit, the automatically translated code will need human-in-the-loop refactoring to arrive at idiomatic Rust. Therefore, we provide compiler plugins that instrument the original C code, the new Rust code to check whether the two programs behave identically when fed the same inputs. The checking can either happen at runtime (using a multi-variant execution environment to run the processes side by side) or offline based on logging. We'd love to hear what everyone thinks of this aspect too.

> send once a month public release request with a diff to merge into the public one

That makes it incredibly difficult to collaborate with others.

I didn't say it wouldn't be difficult, I said it would not be impossible. How badly do you want the money? How badly do you want to do the project? If the answer is really badly, then, from personal experience, you will put up with some friction. If the answer is not that badly, well, then, how angry can you be when you said no? In my own career I've made decisions that go either way at different times.

My ideal funding model is to have someone slide a manilla envelope full of cash under the door every month, and never speak to me or compel me to do anything. There are not that many opportunities like that out there. If you can't find one of those, you're going to compromise.

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