Where Does the Performance Go? Understanding and Recovering Performance Regressions in C-to-Rust Translation

Abstract

Rust is increasingly adopted as a memory-safe successor to C, and transpilers such as \crust{} can migrate entire C projects while preserving their behavior. Preserving behavior, however, does not guarantee preserving performance. We study this gap on 20 real-world C projects and their \crust{} translations. On the eight projects used for analysis, the translated Rust is more than 3\% slower than the original C on 12 of 19 operations, by up to 62.2\%. By comparing execution-cost profiles, optimized LLVM IR, and compiler optimization remarks across each C--Rust pair, we trace these slowdowns to nine recurring performance issues, spanning residual runtime work, missed compiler optimizations, and C-style source patterns, and derive an optimization direction for each. We then present \ourtool{}, an LLM-based approach that encodes these issues as reusable optimization rules to recover the performance of translated Rust. \ourtool{} profiles each project to locate hot functions and matches them against rule-specific patterns. The LLM then checks each rule's rewrite preconditions against the project context before rewriting, and a rewrite is kept only if it passes both functional and performance validation. On 41 operations from twelve held-out projects, \ourtool{} preserves C outputs on all tested workloads and speeds up 40 operations over the \crust{} translations, 18 of which end up faster than the original C. It outperforms the general-purpose coding agent \codex{} on 31 of the 37 operations where both preserve C outputs, and outperforms its own variant without rule guidance on 34 of the 41 operations.