CRUSTPairs: A Cross-Language Dataset of Paired C and Rust Solutions

Vojtech Hejlek, Leonardo Jesus Almeida, Alneu de Andrade Lopes

C-to-Rust migration is an active agenda, but no dataset pairs the two languages at the level of whole solutions to a shared problem. We present CRUSTPairs, 1857 C/Rust implementation pairs drawn from competitive programming archives, normalised, deduplicated, and stratified into difficulty tiers by zero-shot cross-language embedding similarity, with perrecord provenance and licensing. Cross-language retrieval is hard on this data, and harder than a single baseline would suggest: TF-IDF over shared identifiers reaches MRR 0.21 and so beats a pretrained code model at 0.19, which on the hardest quarter of the data scores 1.7x chance. Finetuning reaches 0.79, and lifts that hardest quarter 10x. Renaming every user identifier settles what is being learned: the finetuned models keep 96-97% of their accuracy without them, while the pretrained model keeps 66\% - less than the lexical baseline does - and on structurally divergent pairs the finetuned models are better without identifiers than with them.