Canonical is co-funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol to find out whether large language models can translate big C codebases into safe, maintainable Rust.
Engineering vice president Jon Seager announced the investment on Ubuntu’s Discourse forum. The research, run by Bristol’s Programming Languages Research Group, will test whether an LLM can take programs of hundreds of thousands of lines of C, break them into smaller components, and rewrite those pieces in “safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust.”
Seager was careful to frame the project as research rather than a plan to let bots loose on Ubuntu’s codebase. “Traditional source-to-source translators can process substantial amounts of code, but often preserve the structure of the C too literally,” he wrote. “The result may compile as Rust, but still rely heavily on unsafe operations, retain awkward C idioms and require significant manual work.”
Canonical’s Rust push is already underway in other forms. Ubuntu 25.10 shipped a Rust implementation of sudo and the separately maintained uutils coreutils, both human-written rewrites of existing tools.
The project is part of a broader industry interest in using AI to migrate legacy C code to memory-safe languages, an area of growing attention from regulators and maintainers alike.
