Adatran was terrible. Hard to impossible to edit if something needed fixing. Used none of the features that made Ada a decent language. The very limited code they did this to did work however. This was a huge project and included C and ada code.
What do we call C code transpiled to Rust. Crust?
The goal of c2rust is not “regularly compile C to Rust and keep compiling that garbage”. The goal of c2rust is “migrate a C codebase to Rust”. That is the tagline of the Git repository, as well as the title of the RustConf 2018 presentation linked in TFA.
The idea is that you convert the entire thing to working (but unsafe and C-equivalent) Rust, then have your entire build pipeline and tooling ready to chip at it and perform the conversion to safe rust, as an alternative to performing the conversion piecemeal and having a C/Rust boundary which you have to keep moving about, and duplicated definitions for the interop.
Because the translation, while it works, is awful
Now, translating everything and then going function by function seems better
Fun fact: in ancient Rust, what we now call extern "C" functions were called "crust" functions, pronounced like the word.