Luca Palmieri: How to Migrate C/C++ to Rust Without Breaking What Works
How do you rewrite C/C++ projects to Rust?
Luca Palmieri from Mainmatter discusses practical strategies for migrating C/C++ projects to Rust. He argues that incremental migration is often safer than a full rewrite, starting with isolated modules at the leaves of the dependency graph. Key challenges include FFI boundaries, build system integration, and maintaining safety across languages. Palmieri emphasizes that migration success depends on building confidence release by release, not on a big-bang rewrite.
The point of moving to Rust is to benefit from static analysis, and the code has to be structured in a way that lets those tools help.