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...