Rewriting the world in Rust — Bitfield Consulting

Migrating large C/C++ codebases to Rust is a growing priority driven by memory safety concerns and government mandates, but two popular approaches — full stop-the-world rewrites and AI-powered auto-translation — are both deeply flawed. AI tools degrade sharply on large tasks, and automated translators like c2rust produce non-idiomatic Rust riddled with unsafe blocks. The practical path forward involves: improving existing C++ with safer patterns first, decomposing spaghetti code into well-defined components using the Strangler Fig pattern, then incrementally replacing subsystems with idiomatic Rust one at a time. Interop tools like cxx help bridge the gap during transition. The key insight is that translation is not the hard part — re-architecting programs around Rust's ownership model is, and that work cannot be shortcut.