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Welcome

Welcome to the “C to Rust Migration Book”!

This course will teach you techniques for migration C codebases to Rust.
You’ll learn how to maintain a safe mixed C-Rust codebase, incrementally migrate modules, translate common C idioms to Rust and learn the debugging tools to use when things inevitably break.

We assume prior knowledge of Rust and some C.

You’ll build up your knowledge in small, manageable steps. By the end of the course, you will have solved many exercises, and should be prepared to migrate even larger C codebases to Rust.

Methodology

This course is based on the “learn by doing” principle.
It has been designed to be interactive and hands-on.

Mainmatter developed this course to be delivered in a classroom setting, over 4 days: each attendee advances through the lessons at their own pace, with an experienced instructor providing guidance, answering questions and diving deeper into the topics as needed.
If you’d like to organize a private session for your company, please get in touch.

You can also take the course on your own, but we recommend you find a friend or a mentor to help you along the way should you get stuck.

Formats

You can go through the course material [in the browser]([TODO: insert URL]) or [download it as a PDF file]([TODO: insert URL]), for offline reading.

Structure

On the left side of the screen, you can see that the course is divided into sections. To verify your understanding, each section is paired with an exercise that you need to solve.

You can find the exercises in the companion GitHub repository.
Before starting the course, make sure to clone the repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/mainmatter/migrating-c-to-rust

We also recommend you work on a branch, so you can easily track your progress and pull in updates from the main repository, if needed:

cd c-to-rust-migration-book
git checkout -b my-solutions

All exercises are located in the exercises folder. Each exercise is structured as a Rust package. The package contains the exercise itself, instructions on what to do (in src/lib.rs), and a test suite to automatically verify your solution.

Tools

To work through this course, you’ll need:

[TODO: what’s needed?]

  • Rust. If rustup is already installed on your system, run rustup update (or another appropriate command depending on how you installed Rust on your system) to ensure you’re running on the latest stable version.
  • (Optional but recommended) An IDE with Rust autocompletion support. We recommend one of the following:
  • A C compiler. The one provided by your Operating System will be good enough.

Workshop runner

To verify your solutions, we’ve also provided a tool to guide you through the course: the wr CLI, short for “workshop runner”. Install wr by following the instructions on its website.

Once you have wr installed, open a new terminal and navigate to the top-level folder of the repository. Run the wr command to start the course:

wr

wr will verify the solution to the current exercise.
Don’t move on to the next section until you’ve solved the exercise for the current one.

We recommend committing your solutions to Git as you progress through the course, so you can easily track your progress and “restart” from a known point if needed.

Enjoy the course!

Author

This course was written by Jonas Kruckenberg, Engineering Consultant at Mainmatter.
Jonas Kruckenberg is a systems engineer and technologist focused on next-generation computing infrastructure. He is the lead author of k23, an experimental high-reliability operating system. As a TC39 Invited Expert, he helps shape the future of web by bringing non-browser perspectives to JavaScript language standardization.