Migrate C to Rust, one exercise at a time

You've got a C codebase you'd like to move to Rust, but you're not sure where to start?
This course is for you!

You'll learn techniques for migrating C codebases to Rust by solving exercises.
You'll learn how to maintain a safe mixed C-Rust codebase, incrementally migrate modules, translate common C idioms to Rust, and use the debugging tools you'll need when things inevitably break — one exercise at a time.

Note

This course has been written by Mainmatter.
It's one of the trainings in our portfolio of Rust workshops.
Check out our landing page if you're looking for Rust consulting or training!

Getting started

Clone this repository to your local machine:

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

We 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.

To verify your solutions, we've 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, navigate to the top-level folder of the repository, and run:

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.

Requirements

• Rust (follow instructions here).
  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 make sure you're running on the latest stable version.
• A C compiler. The one provided by your operating system will be good enough.
• (Optional but recommended) An IDE with Rust autocompletion support. We recommend one of the following:
  • RustRover;
  • Visual Studio Code with the rust-analyzer extension.

License

Copyright © 2024- Mainmatter GmbH (https://mainmatter.com), released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.