> these translations are still useful as a starting point, not a destination.

This was the case for the Go compiler (automatic translation from C to Go), and it has worked out well in practice. There are still some vestiges, but it's moving more and more toward idiomatic Go all the time.

Yeah, this is the broad goal of the project. As much as I love fresh rewrites, I don't think they have nearly the same hope of becoming successful as this sort of gradual approach. It's a big project, and there's lots of code that's still not idiomatic by any means, but the goal is to get 1% better every day.

> Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase.

Yes. But I agree with the parent that there is a credibility problem here. The featured repository calls itself a fork "written entirely in Rust" (emphasis mine). It doesn't call itself "autotranslated to Rust". There would be enough room for that in the title, but the author decided to spend that room on calling it "free-range, non-GMO" instead. It doesn't acknowledge the point you raise, that this is apparently much closer to a starting point than to the destination.

The README is somewhat circumspect about the fact that this is autotranslated. It does mention c2rust, but doesn't actually say anything about the status of a conversion to safe, idiomatic Rust. There is a long list of commits which suggest that the author did a lot of manual fixes, so something was done beyond just autotranslation, but it's hard to judge.

So I think the credibility danger is that if HN were to get more frequent "X written in Rust" that would turn out to just be "X autotranslated to Rust", at some point the community might tire of upvoting these, and other "X actually written in Rust" submissions might get buried. Or similarly, instead of a general "it's feasible and useful to rewrite X in Rust" impression, the wider community (somewhat open to Rust but not diehard fans) might get an impression of "even Rust fans are too lazy to actually rewrite stuff in safe Rust".

But doesn't "fork" imply that it's not actually a re-write or a clone?

`unsafe` is already very prevalent in the ecosystem and this is a big point of contention.

https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/289

This would be anecdotal, and caused massive stir in the community when it was realized.

And a lot of the usages were promptly fixed when people made a stink about it.

It was only fixed when a fuzzer showed a lot of vulnerabilities. Up until then the attitude was "stop demonizing unsafe, we know what we're doing."

I don't know about those particular authors. However, the vibe I get from the rust community as a whole is "unsafe is where dragons lay". Most, I'd say, treat it just like inline asm in C++. Sometimes a necessary evil, but not something you should be in the habit of using.

Actix is currently popular, but only because the rest of the ecosystem has been waiting for `async-await`, and taking a slow-and-steady approach to getting things right. I'd expect Actix's popularity to take a dramatic downturn right about when Rocket releases a async version that runs on stable Rust.