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.
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.
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.
