I'm curious how much experience people have with hand-translation of one language into another. What I find is that for not-too-different languages (e.g., C to Java, or C to Modula-3) I can process about 1000 lines per day. K&R C to ANSI C goes a good deal more quickly.
C pointers translated into Java become a pair, the array that you are indexing into, and an index. I used this strategy for gdtoa and it was good enough. Unstructured and tricky-exit control flow translated into Java was a much more interesting change; for that I used a combination of break out of single iteration for loops, and sometimes booleans to indicate code that should be skipped (that was previously jumped over). For Go you'd probably replace increment/decrement pointers with slices. C++ would be harder because of templates, but it depends very much on how exciting the old code's use of templates is. The advantage of hand-translation is that you don't have to solve all the inputs that mighty theoretically arise, instead you need only consider the problem at hand, and if you can hack around the tricky bits in some ugly way, the rest tends to proceed rather smoothly. And obviously (I hope this is obvious), if your goal is to increase security, you will not do it all with unsafe. I did once also work on an automated source-to-source checker for C and C++, and it turns out that you can get a tremendous amount of mileage out of recognizing idioms and special-casing them. The one problem with the approach I describe -- dealing with the code that you've got, selecting idiom-specific translations -- is that if it fails, what it means is that you have even more motivation to translate the input code out of C, because it is most likely tricksy, squirrelly, and all the more untrustworthy because of that. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
