一句话：研究 C 到安全 Rust 翻译中别名分析的限制，并提出编码更精确分析结果的方法，使安全指针引用提升 75%。
本文研究将 C 代码（翻译后含 unsafe 裸指针的 Rust 程序）自动转换为使用安全 Rust 引用的方法及其局限。作者通过新颖评估方法考察基于所有权与生命周期推断的裸指针到安全引用翻译。结果发现，现有方法受 Rust 编译器安全检查器精度不足的严重限制，许多安全指针操作被误判为可能不安全，并推翻此前研究结论。为改进翻译，作者提出把更精确分析的结果编码为未修改 Rust 编译器可理解的形式，并实现其中一种方法；该实现使可转换为安全 Rust 引用的指针比例从基线的 12% 提升至 21%，相对提高 75%。
The Rust language was created to provide safe low-level systems programming. There is both industrial and academic interest in the problem of (semi-)automatically translating C code to Rust in order to exploit Rust's safety guarantees. We study the effectiveness and limitations of existing techniques for automatically translating unsafe raw pointers (in Rust programs translated from C) into safe Rust references via ownership and lifetime inference. Our novel evaluation methodology enables our study to extend beyond prior studies, and to discover new information contradicting the conclusions of prior studies. We find that existing translation methods are severely limited by a lack of precision in the Rust compiler's safety checker, causing many safe pointer manipulations to be labeled as potentially unsafe. Leveraging this information, we propose methods for improving translation, based on encoding the results of a more precise analysis in a manner that is understandable to an unmodified Rust compiler. We implement one of our proposed methods, increasing the number of pointers that can be translated to safe Rust references by 75% over the baseline (from 12% to 21% of all pointers).
@article{paperbot2021,
title = {Aliasing Limits on Translating C to Safe Rust},
author = {Mehmet Emre and Peter Boyland and Aesha Parekh and Ryan Schroeder and Kyle Dewey and Ben Hardekopf},
journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
volume = {7},
number = {OOPSLA1},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1145/3586046}
}