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UID:pretalx-adass2026-WZLDXB@pretalx.adass.org
DTSTART;TZID=AWST:20261103T110000
DTEND;TZID=AWST:20261103T111500
DESCRIPTION:In 2026 large language model coding agents such as Codex and Cl
 aude have developed rapidly and changed the face of software development. 
 They can be used for debugging\, performance optimization\, and adding fea
 tures to existing codebases. As the tooling improved we decided to see if 
 we could use these systems to port a large C library to Rust. The library 
 we chose was the Starlink AST library\, a library that consists of 200\,00
 0 lines of C (not including comments or blank lines) that has been in deve
 lopment for over 30 years and contains some very specific fixes for very r
 are combinations of FITS headers. \n\nIn this talk I will tell the story o
 f agents getting confused (but also agents improving)\, agents cutting cor
 ners and hoping I wouldn't notice\, agents finding bugs in the original co
 de but then making sure the Rust had the same bugs\, eye-watering token co
 sts\, and how the real lesson from this journey is that your ported code i
 s only as good as the test suite of your original library.
DTSTAMP:20261001T111404Z
LOCATION:Banquet Hall
SUMMARY:Using LLMs to Port a Large C Library to Rust - Tim Jenness
URL:https://pretalx.adass.org/adass2026/talk/WZLDXB/
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