It's still shocking to me that the approach taken wasn't to have Claude write a tool that translates Zig to Rust. I imagine it would've been cheaper, deterministic, and each iteration would produce a better tool.
This seems like a much much harder problem than having a model translate between the two languages. I think people in general are way overvaluing determinism. In most cases, it doesn’t matter if the output from two runs is different as long as it accomplishes the desired goal.
Never thought of cross language code mods to be a thing but surely there are libraries out there that deal with the interop of different ASTs across languages? Seems like an interesting area of research.
That's the approach I've taken with a bunch of legacy OpenCL code I've mechnically translated to Metal, worked great.