Fully automated C-to-safe-Rust transpilation

Develop fully automated techniques for transpiling C programs into Rust’s safe subset, producing memory-safe and idiomatic Rust code without manual intervention.

Background

The paper introduces CRUST-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate systems that transpile C repositories into safe, idiomatic Rust that compiles and passes provided test cases. Translating C to Rust involves not only functional equivalence but also adherence to Rust’s strict ownership, borrowing, and type system to ensure memory safety.

Despite recent advances in LLMs and agentic systems, the authors find that current approaches achieve relatively low success rates on CRUST-Bench, highlighting the difficulty of repository-scale, interface-constrained, safe Rust generation. This motivates the explicit recognition that fully automated C-to-safe-Rust transpilation remains unresolved.