--- title: "Canonical and UK’s University of Bristol partner to investigate automated C to Rust translations" url: https://daily.dev/posts/canonical-and-uk-s-university-of-bristol-partner-to-investigate-automated-c-to-rust-translations-audhembrp source_url: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4212147/canonical-and-uks-university-of-bristol-partner-to-investigate-automated-c-to-rust-translations.html type: article source: "InfoWorld" published: 2026-08-20T21:02:06.816Z updated: 2026-08-21T09:26:41.969Z tags: ["rust", "c"] reading_time: 3 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Canonical and UK’s University of Bristol partner to investigate automated C to Rust translations **[InfoWorld](https://daily.dev/sources/infoworld)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Canonical is funding a three-year PhD research project with the University of Bristol to build a platform that automatically translates large C codebases into idiomatic, behaviorally correct Rust. Led by Professor Meng Wang with Canonical's Jon Seager and Dr. Cristina David as co-supervisors, the project combines machine learning translation with formal program analysis and validation to avoid the pitfalls of naive source-to-source translators and unreliable LLM output. The proposed architecture has four stages: scheduling, translation, validation, and debugging/repair. AppArmor and snap-confine are named as case studies, though Canonical stresses this is not a commitment to replace them. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Is Canonical funding a project to automatically translate C code into Rust? Yes, Canonical and UK Research and Innovation are funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol to build a platform that translates large C repositories into behaviorally correct, idiomatic Rust. Professor Meng Wang leads the project, with Canonical's Jon Seager and Dr. Cristina David as co-supervisors of PhD student Alex Wood. _Teams weighing a move away from C toward Rust can follow migration research like this on daily.dev._ ### Why can't large language models alone reliably translate C code to Rust? LLMs can produce convincing, idiomatic Rust but struggle with repository-scale context and offer no guarantee the translated program behaves like the original source. Plausible-looking output is not evidence of correctness, so generated code must be treated as untrusted until validated against the source's actual behavior through separate program analysis. _daily.dev helps developers evaluating AI-assisted code translation stay current on validation techniques._ ### What Ubuntu components are being used as case studies for C to Rust translation research? AppArmor and snap-confine, two Ubuntu security components, are the targeted case studies for Canonical's C-to-Rust translation research. Canonical clarified this is not a commitment to replace either component with generated Rust code, but reflects a vested interest in seeing how the translation system performs on real, security-sensitive software. _daily.dev keeps developers tracking Rust adoption in core Linux security tooling up to date._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Automatically Translating C to Rust – Communications of the ACM](https://daily.dev/posts/automatically-translating-c-to-rust-communications-of-the-acm-o6bpcy6bu) · Hacker News · 5 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#c](https://daily.dev/tags/c) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/canonical-and-uk-s-university-of-bristol-partner-to-investigate-automated-c-to-rust-translations-audhembrp)