Conversion of legacy nontrivial C++ code bases into Rust (or anything else for that matter) feels like it should be one of the "Millenium problems" for AGI. That and full self driving - including the nuances of gesturing to a human about who's going to reverse in a single lane in a snowstorm.
But if 50% of code can be converted automatically to safe idiomatic Rust? Great. Doesn't sound too far fetched. But yes, there's certainly a long tail here.
> Conversion of legacy nontrivial C++ code bases into Rust (or anything else for that matter) feels like it should be one of the "Millenium problems" for AGI.
Whilst I have no doubt that LLMs will be useful here, I still have reservations about validation. I think experience tells us that test coverage is generally insufficient to ensure functional equivalence, and not all components are well specified.
ProgramBench was published recently where agents have to reconstruct a program given just the binary and documentation.
https://programbench.com/
If we have AGI, it can just solve all the memory issues in the existing codebase instead of rewriting it all.
But then we'd still be left with a C or C++ codebase.