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A lot of very critical infrastructure is still not even rewritten into C, rewriting it all in Rust or whatever is a pipe dream. And before you say that the financial system is not critical, I'd like to see you stop relying on it.

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Does COBOL have undefined behavior and lifetime or aliasing issues like C? I have never heard that it does, but don’t know enough to say for sure it doesn’t.

Rewriting in C seems like a dodged bullet. Better for it to stay on older safer languages.

Most COBOL rewrites I have heard of went to Java, a safe language.

At this rate, we're more likely to see major advancements in AI enabling verifiable rewrites than we are to see the C++ committee make any substantive efforts towards improving safety or ergonomics. And I'm only half-joking.

There is some really promising-looking work on using a mixture of LLMs and formal proof techniques and/or unit testing to perform reliable and idiomatic translation from unsafe to safe languages. See, for example, https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12511v2 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10506, and https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17741v1

The nice thing about this approach is that the LLMs don't need to be flawless for it to work, as the formal analysis / unit testing will keep their errors at bay - they just need to be good enough to eventually output something that passes the tests.

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