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A comment on DARPA: Translating All C to Rust (Tractor). Parent comment

Re:DARPA: Translating All C to Rust (Tractor) by suprjami on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @05:43PM (#41114432)
In my experience (supporting a machine-translated codebase which resulted in shitty Java) your theory doesn't play out.

If you give developers a shitty codebase then those developers will leave to work somewhere else.

After a few years of working on this codebase we had 88% turnover. 1 in 10 developers remembered the original project's design philosophy and intention.

It wasn't a good situation.

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Re:DARPA: Translating All C to Rust (Tractor) by dcsommer on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @07:29PM (#41115112)
GP was proposing a different situation where the source code is not changing or changing very rarely. If you have a high churn codebase, obviously the maintenance experience will worsen dramatically after machine translation (at least with many current tools), so your experience is not unexpected.
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