"“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases"
Fundamentally is there anything you can't write in rust and must write in C? With AI languages should mostly be transposable even though right now they are not.
Anyone who's done some vibe coding can imagine what a mess a vibe coded operating system is going to be with current day tools. LLM agent coding is good at making small prototype web apps and the like but trying to apply it to significantly complex legacy software is a nightmare.
As off the wall as this kind of thinking is, I actually agree this is probably what Microsoft has to embrace, and this isn't even going far enough.
Anyone who has experience with LLMs knows that strong typing, static validation, and testing is how you get the most out of codegen. The kind of thing Rust is for. I can think of ways to do this gradually, that would actually work.
It's something that would take years to see effects in a C++ codebase but I think the alternative of sticking with C++ is a dead end.
Title is "Microsoft to replace all C/C++ with Rust"
Meanwhile the content of the post is merely that an engineer who works for a team within Microsoft's AI division wrote on LinkedIn "my goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft". (He believes that he can get AI agents to accomplish this.)
Not quite the same as an official plan announced by the CTO or something. Bit misleading title.
A sinking ship is becoming a sunken ship, I guess. With this rate of changes and "AI" in charge, I would be surprised if Windows will not finally turn into an unusable mess of bugs, memory leaks (no, Rust does not prevent them) and ruining the compatibility with all of the apps in process (the highlight of Windows, keeping people to still use it despite all MS effort to ruin the OS)
My personal goal was to replace all of Microsoft in my life. I mostly achieved this 30 years ago with the help of a C program. Now I only have to use Microsoft products when other people I collaborate with insist on using them. So if Rust with the help of AI wll kill Microsoft with this project, this would make me very happy and I certainly will look at this language much more favorably.
If this was a real project, they’d start from scratch and design the OS using Rust idioms.
But it’s nothing more than marketing drivel. The goal is for clueless C-level folks to say “if MS can do this with their AI, surely we can take care of our problems using a few copilot subscriptions and a large layoff!”
> Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’
How do they intend to accomplish this? Assuming 40 hour work weeks (160 hours/month), and even assuming a developer would spend their entire 8 hour work day solely reviewing generated Rust code, that would still be ~104 lines of code per minute. At that point what value does the engineer they're hiring even have if they'd just be scrolling through the code and giving it a cursory glance?
A million lines of code per engineer per month, they say.
What a dreadfully bad use of excellent technology!
LLMs could help the review all that code, and help their programmers find problematic C or C++ code that could be fixed, or perhaps replaced with Rust.
What they are proposing is mindless foolishness. AI slop on an industrial scale
In one of the comments he talked about concurrency safety. As someone who has just touched the lock implementations in a toy OS -- xv6, I found concurrency issues to be extremely easy to flare up and very hard to debug. Does Rush provide something lock-related that is similar to memory safety?
> Update:
It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended... with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.
> Just to clarify... Windows is *NOT* being rewritten in Rust with AI.
> My team’s project is a research project. We are building tech to make migration from language to language possible. The intent of my post was to find like-minded engineers to join us on the next stage of this multi-year endeavor—not to set a new strategy for Windows 11+ or to imply that Rust is an endpoint.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] threadfrom the LinkedIn post [0]:
> I have an open position in my team for a IC5 Principal Software Engineer. The position is in-person in Redmond.
> My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.
so perhaps a more accurate title would be "one guy at Microsoft, in a LinkedIn job posting, says it's his goal to replace all C/C++ code with Rust"
0: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/galenh_principal-software-eng...
What can go wrong? Yikes...
Anyone who has experience with LLMs knows that strong typing, static validation, and testing is how you get the most out of codegen. The kind of thing Rust is for. I can think of ways to do this gradually, that would actually work.
It's something that would take years to see effects in a C++ codebase but I think the alternative of sticking with C++ is a dead end.
Somewhat relevant: I chuckled at this (quite accurate) 2 hour overview of the unfixable problems with C++: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fGB-hjc2Gc.
Unreliable source: I worked at Microsoft (on C++) many years ago and I've been writing C++ on/off for ~15 years.
Meanwhile the content of the post is merely that an engineer who works for a team within Microsoft's AI division wrote on LinkedIn "my goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft". (He believes that he can get AI agents to accomplish this.)
Not quite the same as an official plan announced by the CTO or something. Bit misleading title.
A guiding metric on lines of code. How could this possibly go wrong?
But it’s nothing more than marketing drivel. The goal is for clueless C-level folks to say “if MS can do this with their AI, surely we can take care of our problems using a few copilot subscriptions and a large layoff!”
How do they intend to accomplish this? Assuming 40 hour work weeks (160 hours/month), and even assuming a developer would spend their entire 8 hour work day solely reviewing generated Rust code, that would still be ~104 lines of code per minute. At that point what value does the engineer they're hiring even have if they'd just be scrolling through the code and giving it a cursory glance?
A million lines of code per engineer per month, they say.
What a dreadfully bad use of excellent technology!
LLMs could help the review all that code, and help their programmers find problematic C or C++ code that could be fixed, or perhaps replaced with Rust.
What they are proposing is mindless foolishness. AI slop on an industrial scale
Rust is good. Rust is not magic
> Update: It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended... with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.
> Just to clarify... Windows is *NOT* being rewritten in Rust with AI.
> My team’s project is a research project. We are building tech to make migration from language to language possible. The intent of my post was to find like-minded engineers to join us on the next stage of this multi-year endeavor—not to set a new strategy for Windows 11+ or to imply that Rust is an endpoint.