Recoleta Item Note

His2Trans: A Skeleton First Framework for Self Evolving C to Rust Translation with Historical Retrieval

c-to-rustcode-translationretrieval-augmented-generationbuild-awareself-evolvingcode-migration

Summary

His2Trans is a framework for industrial-scale C-to-Rust migration. Its core idea is to first build a compilable, strongly typed project skeleton, then gradually generate function logic by combining it with retrieval of historical migration knowledge. It aims to solve problems in large-project migration such as missing build context, missing domain API mappings, and uncontrolled repair loops.

Problem

Existing automated C→Rust migration methods often fail on industrial projects because of missing build context, making it impossible to recover precise types and dependencies, which leads to “dependency hell” and hallucinated dependencies.
General-purpose LLMs alone struggle to infer domain-specific APIs and historical evolution patterns, so they cannot reuse existing Rust interfaces and are prone to generating non-idiomatic or even non-integrable code.
Large projects usually require incremental migration. If each repair triggers cascading compilation errors, the cost of automation quickly becomes unmanageable; this matters because the paper cites memory-safety issues in C as one source of about 70% of security vulnerabilities, and migration to Rust is therefore an important industrial direction.

Approach

It first performs build tracing to recover macros, types, conditional compilation, and dependencies from the real build process, generating a compilable Project-Level Skeleton Graph; simply put, it first sets up the entire Rust project’s “empty frame” and ensures the types are correct.
The skeleton preserves directory structure, module relationships, type definitions, global state, and function signatures, while function bodies are initially filled with unimplemented! placeholders, separating structural verification from logic generation.
It then automatically mines API-level rules and fragment-level rules from historical C/Rust migration repositories to form an accumulable knowledge base; during retrieval it uses BM25 + reranker + RAG to feed similar historical examples to the LLM.
Function-body translation is scheduled bottom-up topologically according to the dependency graph: functions with fewer dependencies are translated first, then higher-level functions; at each step, compiler feedback is used for rule repair or LLM repair, and when necessary it falls back to C2Rust unsafe code to preserve compilability.
Translation results that pass verification are written back into the knowledge base, forming a self-evolving closed loop that makes subsequent unseen tasks easier to repair.

Results

On industrial OpenHarmony modules, His2Trans reports a 99.75% incremental compilation pass rate and claims it can fix failures in baseline methods caused by missing build context.
On general benchmarks, compared with C2Rust, its unsafe code ratio is reduced by 23.6 percentage points while also producing the fewest warnings.
In knowledge accumulation experiments, as verified migration patterns continue to be added, repair overhead on unseen tasks drops by about 60%, indicating that the system has an evolutionary capability of “getting stronger with use.”
The evaluation covers 5 OpenHarmony submodules and 10 general-purpose C projects; the paper also lists multiple baselines (such as C2Rust, PTRMAPPER, EvoC2Rust, Tymcrat, etc.), but the excerpt does not provide the full itemized comparison table or all numerical details.
The experimental setup emphasizes zero-human-intervention, meaning there was no manual post-editing or cherry-picking during evaluation.

Link

http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02617v1

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