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.
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.