“I think [this technique] could have a lot of value for developers coding in C since it can jumpstart the transition to Rust and also aid in helping these programmers learn Rust, which can be a challenging transition,” said Jim Mercer, program VP, software development, DevOps & DevSecOps at IDC.
“It is not quite a Cobol situation,” Mercer added, “but many of the key C programmers are nearing retirement, so the maintenance of these applications and systems could become a more prominent issue down the road. Also, we are so focused on memory safety that we neglect to highlight other benefits of Rust. It offers modern language features like concurrency primitives, pattern matching, and a powerful type system, which can lead to more concise, expressive, and maintainable code.”
Moor’s Andersen pointed to additional benefits. “One thing that is promising would be using Gen AI to help accelerate Mini-C and the migration process further,” he said. “We are starting to see cloud providers like AWS and IBM making tools to help migrate from .NET to Java or even Cobol to Java. Maybe a tool like Q Developer could do Rust to C someday.”
