As part of the collaboration between Canonical and the University of Bristol, the project will target AppArmor and snap-confine as industrial case studies. Both are critical to Ubuntu’s security posture, and provide a substantially harder test than isolated translation examples. They will help us evaluate whether the techniques can cope with the structure and constraints of mature production software.
Note that this is not a commitment to replace AppArmor or snap-confine with what is generated, rather that we have a vested interest in the software and are keen to see the results.
The most optimistic outcome would be a system capable of translating substantial C repositories into Rust with strong evidence of behavioural equivalence and relatively little manual intervention. The research could also produce better methods for decomposing repositories, stronger validation techniques, reusable translation datasets, improved program-repair tools and a more precise understanding of where automated migration stops being reliable.
IMO this rust shit is just an attempt to convert a GPL licensed ecosystem into the Corpo-CHUD preferred MIT license.
Just like with Clang, the Corpo is simply intolerably offended by being asked to contribute back to the community.
Wait waddup with clang? Any sources I could read up on?
Clang seems to mainly be maintained by Apple under the Apache license
Wow! What an observant smart thought.
Well, except for the fact that code conversion doesn’t give you the permission to change licenses or remove copyright. And the small matter of fact that both projects mentioned are Canonical projects, where whatever code that is not directly copyrighted by Canonical, is contributed by someone who signed an agreement with this stipulation:
(b) To the maximum extent permitted by the relevant law, You grant to Us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, irrevocable licence under the Copyright covering the Contribution, with the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees, to reproduce, modify, display, perform and distribute the Contribution as part of the Material; provided that this license is conditioned upon compliance with Section 2.3.
“Us” being Canonical of course. So they could actually “re-license” the projects right now, without changing a single line of code.
It’s always astonishing how condiment in their ignorance people are when it comes to these matters.
You geniuses are getting too predictable with your ignorance.
I literally wrote what’s quoted above yesterday replying to someone else.
Using Rust in no way requires the usage of pushover licenses. While it’s true that many devs are using pushover licenses, there are plenty of GPL Rust projects. You are just focusing on the sensationalized ones that get mentioned in news cycles.
- AGPL Rust projects on GitHub
- GPL Rust projects on GitHub
- Unfortunately, Codeberg doesn’t support filtering by license, but there are Rust projects on Codeberg, some of which will use copyleft licenses here.
- GNOME’s GitLab is also rife with GPL-licensed Rust projects.
It doesn’t require, but they use rust as an excuse to do that. Ubuntu’s attempts at rust rewrite was all license change iirc.
It’s the general opinion. Except if you’re a stray liberal on lemmy.ml/c/Linux
Lemmy is written in Rust. I don’t think dessalines is a stray liberal on lemmy.ml lol
You’re missing the key part of the argument: relicensing.
Which speaks to my other comment: nothing about Rust necessitates using corpo licenses. The reason so many things are being rewritten in Rust is that it’s a great language and it provides tangible benefits to users. The owning class doesn’t need a special language as a pretext to de-GPL an ecosystem. They could do it with C, OCAML, or any other lang.
I always feel like the much bigger challenge is whether anyone can still maintain the codebase afterwards. You throw away so much institutional knowledge by doing a conversion like this…
You don’t just convert and sleep though. You convert and prune. You slowly rework parts post-conversion to use more sensible approaches/libraries. It’s not a one-and-done operation, it’s an ongoing thing that they judge the cost of investing in now is less than the long term maintaining C Ubuntu.
Well the issue is the chosen person is going to be automating the process, not doing it by hand, so there is no refactoring going on.
Look at the folks in college right now, no one can or will.
I don’t get why the rust cult mist always convert something from C to rust. Why not just make new software in rust and leave the stuff that works alone?
It isn’t always about “new”. For example, some GNU binaries are decades old and were changed only to fix bugs.
C has major disadvantages compared to Rust, which is why even Linus Torvalds said a couple of years ago, to not write any new C code anymore for the Kernel and that old code will be transpiled steadily.
It is not about a cult. It is not about being fancy. It is quite the opposite. Choosing Rust over C is very rational.
Also, obligatory fuck Canonical. Automatic transpiling is such a stupid thing. Have fun maintaining the new code that was written by a machine, while not having any Rust experts in your team.
Because of the users that don’t want to change how they work. But still would like not to be owned by the onslaught of LLM wielding hackers
