Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol that aims to automatically translate C code into memory-safe Rust.
The project
The research is led by Professor Meng Wang at Bristol, with matching support from UK Research and Innovation. The motivation is memory safety: Rust gives systems programmers finer control over performance and resources while eliminating whole classes of memory-safety defects – especially valuable at security boundaries.
A “neurosymbolic” approach
Rather than relying on language models alone, the project combines machine learning with program analysis, testing and formal methods – split into four components: scheduling, translation, validation, and debugging/repair. The industrial case studies are AppArmor and snap-confine, two security-critical Ubuntu components. They are explicitly test cases, not planned replacements. The work is scheduled to begin later in 2026.
Source: Canonical / Ubuntu Discourse.
