EVOC2RUST: A Skeleton-guided Framework for Project-Level C-to-Rust
  Translation
Authors: name: Chaofan Wang; name: Tingrui Yu; name: Jie Wang; name: Dong Chen; name: Wenrui Zhang; name: Yuling Shi; name: Xiaodong Gu; name: Beijun Shen
Published: 2025-08-06 10:31:23

Abstract: Rust's compile-time safety guarantees make it ideal for safety-critical
systems, creating demand for translating legacy C codebases to Rust. While
various approaches have emerged for this task, they face inherent trade-offs:
rule-based solutions face challenges in meeting code safety and idiomaticity
requirements, while LLM-based solutions often fail to generate semantically
equivalent Rust code, due to the heavy dependencies of modules across the
entire codebase. Recent studies have revealed that both solutions are limited
to small-scale programs. In this paper, we propose EvoC2Rust, an automated
framework for converting entire C projects to equivalent Rust ones. EvoC2Rust
employs a skeleton-guided translation strategy for project-level translation.
The pipeline consists of three evolutionary stages: 1) it first decomposes the
C project into functional modules, employs a feature-mapping-enhanced LLM to
transform definitions and macros and generates type-checked function stubs,
which form a compilable Rust skeleton; 2) it then incrementally translates the
function, replacing the corresponding stub placeholder; 3) finally, it repairs
compilation errors by integrating LLM and static analysis. Through evolutionary
augmentation, EvoC2Rust combines the advantages of both rule-based and
LLM-based solutions. Our evaluation on open-source benchmarks and six
industrial projects demonstrates EvoC2Rust's superior performance in
project-level C-to-Rust translation. On average, it achieves 17.24% and 14.32%
improvements in syntax and semantic accuracy over the LLM-based approaches,
along with a 96.79% higher code safety rate than the rule-based tools. At the
module level, EvoC2Rust reaches 92.25% compilation and 89.53% test pass rates
on industrial projects, even for complex codebases and long functions.