Migrating Legacy C Code to Rust – Without Rewriting from Scratch

C is still the dominant language in embedded and systems programming, but its unrestricted pointers and manual memory management often cause bugs and vulnerabilities. Rust addresses these issues through strict ownership and lifetime rules – yet translating C to Rust is not straightforward.

As a new feature in emmtrix Studio, we now provide a C-to-Rust Compiler.
emmtrix Studio is our environment for source-to-source code transformation and static analysis, supporting modernization and optimization of embedded software.

The C-to-Rust Compiler:

• Preserves program semantics, including type conversions and control flow
• Minimizes the use of unsafe
• Produces readable Rust output for review and refactoring
• Enables incremental migration while keeping C and Rust aligned

This makes it possible to gradually modernize C projects while retaining the original source as a reliable reference.

👉 Learn more in the emmtrix C-to-Rust wiki article or reach out to Dr. Oliver Wolf (oliver.wolf@emmtrix.com, +49 721 1803 288-3 ) for details.