The C to Rust migration book
Mainmatter's "C to Rust Migration Book" is a guide covering strategies, processes, and technical approaches for migrating existing C codebases to the Rust programming language. It addresses challenges such as gradual migration, interoperability between C and Rust, and maintaining system stability throughout the transition.
Background
The C to Rust Migration Book is a free, practical guide by Mainmatter (a European consultancy) for teams considering moving existing C codebases to Rust. It covers incremental migration strategies, tooling (e.g., bindgen, c2rust, diplomat), interop safety, and trade-offs — rather than advocating a full rewrite. This matters because C still underpins much of the world's infrastructure (OS kernels, embedded systems, cryptography, media codecs), but its manual memory management is a major source of security bugs. Rust offers memory safety without a garbage collector, making it a natural successor for performance-critical C code. Governments and industry initiatives (e.g., US White House memory safety push, Android's Rust adoption) have recently accelerated interest in such transitions.