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A comment on Compiling C to Safe Rust, Formalized. Parent comment

Re:Compiling C to Safe Rust, Formalized by fuhsnn on Saturday December 21, 2024 @01:14AM (#42477849)
>That's what LLMs are for - idiom translation. You can't trust them to do it right, though.

Optimizing C compilers also happened to be good at idiom recognition, and we can probably trust them a little more. The OP paper does mention future plan to use clang as well: >We have plans for a libclang-based frontend that consume actual C syntax.

If such transformation can be done at IR level it might be more efficient to be to C-IR > idiom transform to Rust-IR > run safe-checks in Rust-IR > continue compilation in C-IR or Rust-IR or combining both for better optimization properties.

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Re:Compiling C to Safe Rust, Formalized by swiftcoder on Saturday December 21, 2024 @02:40AM (#42478090)
I'm definitely bullish on this angle of compiling C down to LLVM assembly, and then "decompiling" it back to Rust (with some reference to the original C to reconstruct high-level idioms like for loops)
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