The TRACTOR program aims to automate the translation of legacy C code to Rust. The goal is to achieve the same quality and style that a skilled Rust developer would produce, thereby eliminating the entire class of memory safety security vulnerabilities present in C programs. This program may involve novel combinations of software analysis, such as static analysis and dynamic analysis, and machine learning techniques like large language models.
I think this is an interesting idea. If they’re able to pull it off, I think it will cement the usefulness of LLMs. I have my doubts, but it’s worth trying. I’d imagine that the LLM is specially tuned to be more adept at this task. Your bog-standard GPT-4 or Claude will probably be unreliable.
Having built code converters for the same language to auto migrate to a later version of that language, I’m incredibly worried. We still had to manually verify every thing.
I’m hopeful though that this does become the wave of the future. There’s some serious legacy shit out there that doesn’t have enough of a financial gain to revisit and rewrite.