Allen Wyma talks with Jonas Kruckenberg from Mainmatter about migrating production C and C++ codebases to Rust and the C to Rust Migration Book. They discuss incremental migration, refactoring legacy code, designing safe FFI boundaries, and testing undefined behavior.

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Timestamps

• [@00:00] - Intro
• [@00:10] - Welcome and introducing Jonas Kruckenberg
• [@01:52] - From JavaScript and Tauri to Rust, k23, and Mainmatter
• [@04:41] - Incremental migration versus a complete rewrite
• [@07:51] - The C to Rust Migration Book
• [@13:11] - Why starting with leaf modules can fail
• [@15:31] - Refactoring C before rewriting it in Rust
• [@17:26] - Building safe Rust interfaces over C linked lists
• [@22:06] - Undefined behavior and legacy FFI code
• [@23:29] - Porting strcmp calls with null pointers
• [@25:24] - Testing tools, assertions, and the FFI trust boundary
• [@27:39] - Finding the book and getting in touch
• [@28:25] - Memory safety and the future of Rust

Referenced resources

• The C to Rust Migration Book
• Tauri
• k23

Credits

Intro Theme: Aerocity

Audio Editing: Plangora

Hosting Infrastructure: Jon Gjengset

Show Notes: Plangora

Hosts: Allen Wyma