Canonical backs quest to translate mountains of C into safe Rust with AI

Canonical's fondness for AI and Rust is no secret.

Now it is co-funding a three-year PhD project investigating whether the former can translate large C codebases into the latter.

Engineering veep Jon Seager announced the investment on Ubuntu's Discourse forum.

The PhD project will be conducted at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group.

So don't panic.

This is not an announcement that Canonical will turn the bots loose to rewrite all of Ubuntu as Rusty slop. (For a start, nobody can afford that many tokens.) Instead of burning dosh on bots, Canonical will pay a proto-boffin to spend several years investigating whether the idea can be made to work.

That is welcome.

In an industry overflowing with hype, the project should produce evidence about whether this approach can be useful.

The Reg FOSS desk interviewed Seager last year, and he struck us as sensible and pragmatic, but not lacking in boldness.

Under his guidance, Ubuntu 25.10 adopted a Rust implementation of sudo as well as the entirely separate Rust-based uutils coreutils.

The sudo command did hit some problems but they were quickly fixed.

Both uutils and sudo-rs were pre-existing independent projects, however.

They are human-written replacements designed to reproduce the functionality of existing tools using entirely new codebases.

Certainly, those human developers may have studied the original source code – that's one of the good things about FOSS, after all – but these are new implementations.