> Have you ever seen what comes out of c2rust? It's awful. It relies on a library of functions which emulate unsafe C pointer semantics with unsafe Rust.

which is somewhat close to what their port produced...

like their goal was from the get to go to have a mostly exactly the same as zig "just in rust" which implies mostly unsafe rust and all the soundness/memory issues zig has (plus probably some more due to AI based port instead of a tool like c2ruts)

the thing is if you don't keep things mostly 1:1 with all the problems that has there is absolutely no way to review that PR or catch the AI going rogue with hallucinations etc. With a mostly 1:1 port you can at least check if things seem mostly the same.

but it also means this is just step 1 of very many, with the other being incrementally fixing soundness, removing unsafe and (hopefully) making the code more idiomatic...

(to got to the actual question of why?, I think the answer is doing this port using AI is likely way easier/faster then first writing a tool which need in depth understanding of the languages, especially given that some features in zig do not map 1:1 in rust and fuzzily mapping is what LLMs are good at and human hand written tools tend to be very bad at).