The Story of Building a Rust-Style Static Analyzer for C++ with AI

A systems researcher shares their journey building a Rust-style static analyzer for C++ using AI coding assistants. After 15 years of battling memory bugs in C++, they explored various solutions including Rust interop and Circle C++ before settling on building a custom analyzer. Using Claude AI, they developed rusty-cpp, a tool that brings Rust's borrow checking and memory safety features to C++ through comment-based annotations, without requiring compiler changes. The project uses libclang for AST parsing, supports external library annotations, and includes Rust-style types like Box and Arc. The author reflects on AI's rapid evolution and its implications for systems engineering.