Aliasing Limits on Translating C to Safe Rust
summary
Study measures how many C raw pointers can become Rust safe references after ownership/lifetime inference, using a modified C→unsafe-Rust transpile pipeline and the Rust compiler as an oracle; implements an encoding that nudges the unmodified compiler and raises safe-pointer yield from 12% to 21% of pointers (a 75% relative boost over baseline). Key blockers are huge aliasing equivalence classes; adding directionality and simple casts under a pseudo-safety regime shrinks contamination and recovers many references.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:11Motivation for C→Rust
- 2:57Automating C→Rust challenges
- 4:43Pseudo-safety limits
- 6:26Aliasing and pointer unsafety
- 8:11Compiler analysis for precision
- 9:59Directionality vs aliasing
- 12:29Key findings and future work
- 13:53Q&A
