> Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase.
Yes. But I agree with the parent that there is a credibility problem here. The featured repository calls itself a fork "written entirely in Rust" (emphasis mine). It doesn't call itself "autotranslated to Rust". There would be enough room for that in the title, but the author decided to spend that room on calling it "free-range, non-GMO" instead. It doesn't acknowledge the point you raise, that this is apparently much closer to a starting point than to the destination.
The README is somewhat circumspect about the fact that this is autotranslated. It does mention c2rust, but doesn't actually say anything about the status of a conversion to safe, idiomatic Rust. There is a long list of commits which suggest that the author did a lot of manual fixes, so something was done beyond just autotranslation, but it's hard to judge.
So I think the credibility danger is that if HN were to get more frequent "X written in Rust" that would turn out to just be "X autotranslated to Rust", at some point the community might tire of upvoting these, and other "X actually written in Rust" submissions might get buried. Or similarly, instead of a general "it's feasible and useful to rewrite X in Rust" impression, the wider community (somewhat open to Rust but not diehard fans) might get an impression of "even Rust fans are too lazy to actually rewrite stuff in safe Rust".
