- Speculation arose after a Microsoft Engineer’s LinkedIn post suggested C++ replacement
- The engineer has since clarified this is a research project, not Microsoft plan
- Microsoft is moving towards Rust becoming its “1st class language”
In a LinkedIn post from Microsoft engineer Galen Hunt has generated a fair bit of talk after sharing his goal to “eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030” – even advertising an open position on his team to move towards this.
The role’s purpose was to “help us [Microsoft] evolve and augment our infrastructure to enable translating Microsoft’s largest C and C++ systems to Rust” – with Hunt explaining that “powerful code processing infrastructure” has already been built.
However, the engineer has since updated his post to say “Just to clarify… Windows is *NOT* being rewritten in Rust with AI […] My team’s project is a research project.”
Project, not plan
According to the post, Hunt’s team’s mission is to “build capabilities to allow Microsoft and our customers to eliminate technical debt at scale,” with AI processing infrastructure which “enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding.”
Although the post clarifies that this is just one team’s research, the scale of the project seems to be pretty significant; “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code’,” Hunt explains, “to accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale.”
It is true, though, that Microsoft has initiated a shift towards the Rust programming language – spending $10 million towards making it the “1st class language” for engineering systems.
This push is mirrored in Google’s commitments, with the firm stating that “memory safety bugs in C and C++ continue to be the most-difficult-to-address source of incorrectness,” as Rust joined Java and Kotlin in the Android Open Source Project.
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