alt Hacker NewsIn case the topic of memory safety is interesting to anyone I've been experimenting with using AI agents to port common web infra projects to safe/ performant Rust. Somewhat inspired by the Bun port - was thinking that at some point memory safety might be such a big deal that people just need drop in replacements.
- Valkey/ Redis port here https://github.com/ianm199/valdr (passes ~99% of single node test suite, real prod features like replication/ clustering/ HA early or not implemented) - Further along port of Lua 5.1-5.5 https://github.com/ianm199/lua-rs-port/tree/main - I have a less developed nginx version that would be the north star - These projects are very alpha at the moment
If anyone is interested in getting involved in this or has done similar experiments I'd love to collaborate! There is so much variation in how you can run these large scale agent fleets I don't think anyone has a perfect system yet.
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I find this kind of rewrite both disrespectful and completely useless. Useless because the difficulty isn't getting to a working state but maintaining it. You now have to build a community around it to make any of this worthwhile. What would this software be worth if security issues weren't patched and bugs weren't fixed? You can't do this alone. And I find it disrespectful because people have spent decades building this, and you're taking all that collectively built knowledge to create something that will compete with the project itself.
I hope people will restrain themself from doing this at least in the name of good ethic. I fear this is going to hurt OSS a lot.
I hope people will hold back from this, if only out of respect for the work that came before. I fear it could do real damage to OSS. It would discourage the maintainers whose effort makes any of it possible.
Are you preserving the original software licenses, or AI-laundering the code in the manner[1] of https://malus.sh
1. AI-rewrites are not clean room implementations.
If the source language is C++, another option might be to use AI agents to port to a memory-safe subset of C++ [1]. For the most part, this involves surgical changes and glorified find-and-replace operations. And I'm guessing way fewer tokens :)
If the source language is legacy C, then another option might be (deterministic) transpilation to a memory-safe subset of C++ [2]. The resulting code wouldn't necessarily be performance-optimal, but it can be used for the majority of code that isn't really performance-sensitive.
[1] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/scpp_code_migration [2] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus-AutoTransla...
I love Rust, but porting others software to Rust (or any language) is a mixed bag. I'm a strong believer that good software requires deep domain knowledge to build and maintain. Porting code you don't understand by hand already risks still not understanding it afterwards, doing it in an automated fashion all but guarantees it.
All that to say I think these automated ports are interesting experiments. However if you want to build something people can trust, the people need to be able to trust that you fully understand what is built, and why it's built the way it is.
If someone is porting such disparate projects as Valkey and Lua it is just for show and will be pre-alpha forever.
No one wants Bun in Rust, no one wants the rsync vibe code additions. This is just the only pro-AI comment, so the AI people voted it to the top.
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Respectfully, as an OSS maintainer (not to the scale of nginx or valkey, of course)... if a third-party used an AI agent to rewrite my software in a different language, that gives me absolutely no reason to support that new project.
It is in all respects foreign code in a language I may or may not be familiar with, and worse yet, if I were to take over, I'd be responsible for maintaining the whole black box forever more?
Thank you but no thanks.