Compiling Rust to C with Eurydice

Bridging the Gap

© Lead Image © LevKropotov, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © LevKropotov, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 313/2026
Author(s):

We show you how to write safe, verified Rust code and seamlessly deploy it to legacy C environments.

Systems programming is currently undergoing a seismic shift. For decades, C has been the undisputed king of the kernel space, embedded systems, and foundational system libraries, prized for its raw performance and low-level control. However, its lack of memory safety has historically been the root cause of countless critical security vulnerabilities. Rust, with its stringent borrow checker and guarantee of memory safety without a garbage collector, has rapidly become the language of choice for secure systems development, a status definitively cemented by its official integration into the Linux kernel starting with version 6.1.

Yet, despite Rust's meteoric rise, the reality of enterprise and legacy environments paints a different picture. The digital world still runs on billions of lines of C code, and C compilers are available for virtually every hardware architecture in existence. Transitioning an entire ecosystem to a Rust toolchain overnight is a logistical impossibility. Many downstream projects, highly constrained embedded systems, and entrenched legacy build pipelines simply cannot support the standard Rust compiler or its dependencies. This creates a frustrating paradox for security-conscious developers: How do you write modern, safe, and mathematically verified code in Rust, but deploy it to a world that still exclusively speaks C?

Eurydice solves this exact problem. Developed as a vital tool for high-assurance software engineering, Eurydice is a specialized compiler that translates safe Rust code into clean, standalone, and readable C code. By acting as a crucial bridge between these two paradigms, Eurydice allows developers to leverage Rust's robust type system and advanced verification tools during the development phase, while seamlessly shipping standard C code to environments that demand strict backward compatibility. In this article, I will explore Eurydice's architecture, how to incorporate it into your workflow, and how it is already being deployed in production to secure the future of post-quantum cryptography.

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