Comment by Daishiman
15 hours ago
A. Transpilation is not 100% compatible because there are many idioms in some languages that cannot be directly translated to others. The lifetime system in Rust disallows a lot of constructs coming from languages with more relaxed constraints. Ironically transpilation will produce code with worse semantics than an LLM. B. At this point it's clear that LLMs reason very effectively about code and its intent. If you haven't asked Claude Opus with Max Reasoning to do, I suggest you give it a try, because the results are pretty fantastic.
Push comes to shove, you could probably still ask an LLM to generate transpiler code, if you're so inclined, and then have it fix the remaining "edge cases" afterward, right…?
Transpilers have hundreds of their own edge cases, and unlike this project, there is no complete test suite of Zig -> Rust transpilation to validate your results.