Comment by zozbot234
These are restrictions of idiomatic Safe Rust. You can use either unsafe Rust or, in many cases, less idiomatic but still Safe Rust to sidestep them. (For instance, "aliasable mutable" but otherwise valid references which can often be expressed as &Cell<T>, etc.)
You might still need a "massive cascading change" later on to make the code properly idiomatic once you have Rust on both sides of the boundary, but that's just a one-time thing and quite manageable.
> You can use either unsafe Rust or, in many cases, less idiomatic but still Safe Rust to sidestep them. (For instance, "aliasable mutable" but otherwise valid references which can often be expressed as &Cell<T>, etc.)
There's no doubt that one can convert C into unsafe Rust - C2Rust can automatically convert an entire C codebase into unsafe Rust
The problem is that after such step (which is certainly valuable), converting the code to safe Rust is typically a lot of work, which is the point of the academic research in question. Half baked code, using safety workarounds, doesn't provide any value to a project.