Comment by mariopt

2 days ago

The current level of insanity with AI is off the charts.

Porting to a safe language without the safety features.

As a human I would likely port it the same way. First a translation close to 1:1 from the source, then redesign/refactor areas little by little to match the target language idioms

  • In some cases it's impossible. C to TCL almost fine, C mapped to Scheme, or Prolog, hell awaits, because Scheme's functions can reduce tons of redundant functions to a single one.

C2Rust, the most popular transpiler from C to Rust will leave a bunch of unsafe blocks. After the initial port it is expected for the authors to go in and work to remove them.

  • But if that's the goal then I _think_ the "port" is perfectly achievable without LLMs. Zig transpiles to C, then C2Rust would do the rest

Porting is usually a messy process. Do you know it's less safe than the Zig version? Maybe it's just highlighting where the problems already existed. Regardless, wild hyperbole are not constructive.

  • Nobody knows if it is less safe than the Zig version because nobody has ever read the code. Maintainers included

    • Ironically, suggesting that 13k is ridiculous compared to an unknown (the zig version is available for assessment) is as compelling as any other vibes.