The original LinkedIn post is pretty wild. I wonder if he did a fat line of coke before writing that, or if it actually were any concrete plans that have been worked out.
Like a compiler, we could optimize this by doing no work at all! Once you realize no one will look at any of the results, final or intermediate, there's nothing left to do.
I agree it's mostly only used in conjunction with bullshit, but during a hype bubble a lot of the users of that phrase don't fully realize they're spouting bullshit, and it's used in earnest.
It’s still wild because it’s mostly useless. Rewriting a few core components might improve security a bit, but otherwise it’ll not change anything for end users. This is the typical attractive but useless project for bored programmer with no product or business vision.
How is it wild? On social media I kept seeing things like people falsely expecting the end goal would require manually reading through a million lines of code. It seemed more like people making up reasons to be mad or trying to dunk on the author.
LLMs generate lots of security issues and bugs. Just being "Rust" doesn't automatically fix that. Generating that amount of code means no human review. How could this not end in obvious disaster?
So AI is based on the insecure and buggy human code, but on top of that it can't think for itself? Definitely, in 2025.... 2027 it will be, coding, for us all.
What makes you think any existing recent code added to Windows has been reviewed by anyone? This is the company that broke the start menu and the login screen in two consecutive updates.
They do still review code, but the first wave of layoffs in 2022 mainly hit principal engineers and above because some bean counters said "oh, these are the engineers that are costing us the most per head", so it's kind of the inmates running the asylum now.
And I'll say that their biggest sin was always that their code from the late 90s on was about 20% too clever for their own good. Kind of goes to that classic quip about how how it takes twice your brain power to debug code as it takes to write it, so if you were already maxing out just writing it, then you're not smart enough to debug it. That's half of why features seemed to get a 1.0 release, then get replaced with something rather than iteratively improved (the other half being FAANG style internal incentive structures).
Were all seeing the effects of them clearing house of their weaponized autism that was barely keeping the wheels on the wagon. They do review, but they don't have the ability to do it properly at scale anymore. Which makes rewriting everything even more batshit.
You’re right about the impossibility of reviewing for style, clarity, and coherence. For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.
As a third-party developer in the late 2000s I remember my boss giving me a CDROM binder (binders?) of every single OS release that Microsoft had ever put out. I assume he’d been given it my his developer-relations rep at Microsoft. My team and I used it to ensure our code worked on every MSDOS/Win* platform we cared to target.
I expect that, internally, the Windows team have crazy amounts of resources to implement the most comprehensive regression testing suite ever created. To that extent, at least, you’d be able to tell if the Rust version did what the old code did even if you didn’t read the code itself.
> For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.
That hasn't been nearly the same goal for decades now.
For instance, Crysis literally won't run on win10 or later anymore.
On top of that, security bugs aren't the kind of thing you can automate away during a rewrite that no one has the bandwidth to actually review.
With this mindset I feel like you would also think bumping a C++ compiler toolchain version is impossible due to all the different changes to code generation that could happen. This is already done today and has similar issues where technically all the code can be affected, but it's not reviewed via a process of manually reading every line.
It’s significantly more straight forward to go from a higher level to a lower level representation than it is to go between different high level representations.
That’s not to trivialize what a compiler does, but it’s effectively going from a complex form to its building blocks while maintaining semantics.
Changing high level languages introduces fundamentally different semantics. Both can decompose to the same general building blocks, but you can’t necessarily compose them the same way.
At the simplest example, a compiler backend (the part you’re describing) can’t reason about data access rules. That is the domain of the language’s compiler frontend and a fundamental difference between C++ and Rust that can’t just be directly derived.
A compiler isn't using a statistical model of language more complex than anyone could understand with a lifetime of study to do its translation, adheres to a standard for that translation, and if you're important enough (and Microsoft internal teams are for MSVC), you get heads up on what specifically is changing so you know where to look for issues.
This is "lets put our postgres database on blockchain because I think blockchain is cool" level of crap you see in peak bubble.
There is a C++ standard that everyone writing C++ code follows and newer version are usually compatible with one another regardless of toolchain version. Behavior of the toolchain should not change. Worst case you can use deterministic, reliable tools to automatically detect problematic locations if there really is a behavior change. (compiler warnings/errors for example)
AI code generation is not deterministic and has no guarantee of behavior, thus requires review unless incorrect code is acceptable.
You don't have to use AI code generation to be what is generating the code or you could require some kind of proof of equivalence to verify the code that was generated.
> My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases
From his follow-up:
> 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.
So either he doesn't think that Windows is written in C/C++, it's not "from Microsoft", or he doesn't know what "reading between the lines" means, because those literally are the words he said. Sure, he also said "and algorithms", but I'd argue that inferring that to be a significant difference would require a lot more reading between the lines.
I guess he could also quibble that "eliminating every line of C and C++ from Microsoft" was supposed to mean new lines of code being written rather than existing ones, but that's both not the way most people would read it (if I said I wanted to eliminate all water from the planet, most people wouldn't think I meant I was eliminating rain but leaving the oceans alone) and a bit dubious from a technical perspective (since leaving the existing Windows codebase intact would make it pretty hard not to at least occasionally need to write a new line of code in the existing language).
They also used the first person in describing the position they were hiring for
> I have an open position in my team for a IC5 Principal Engineer. The position in in-person in Redmond
Reading between the lines is what's needed to differentiate that from the immediately following sentences that are also in the first person. I don't think it's remotely as obvious as you're saying that everyone should be able to tell that wasn't the explicit goal the company had given him for the team.
I don’t understand this view point. How is anyone reading ‘way too much’ into the post based on what’s being discussed in this thread. A senior engineer leading a team at Microsoft saying that his goal is to rewrite/replace all C and C++ code with Rust using AI to facilitate the work is plainly saying what the comments in this thread are reacting to. No onenis reading into the statement, just plain reading. And even though it’s been edited since attention got focused on it, the post still says a goal for his team is 1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.
Further, this is not a random speculative post, it is an announcement for a job opening on the posters team.
Microsoft has thousands of senior engineers and one of them engaging in this project and perhaps hiring a small handful of people does not equate to a large company-wide planned mandate.
He is not a senior engineer; he's a distinguished engineer. His pay package is comparable to a director's or VP's, so no he's not just one of thousands of senior engineers.
That is true, there is a lot of emphasis being placed on his post as though it were the embodiment of Microsoft’s goals and policies going forward. I was a little surprised that he is just a lead on a research team from the bombastic tone of the post.
I’ll own up to not considering that when I wrote my comment, still think discussing Microsoft’s seemingly head first dive into massive AI generation of code is entertaining, even if it is not really as important (or important at all) as it would be if this was a post from the CEO.
I mean, there was a time when what ultimately became Windows Vista was going to have a largely .net userspace. They also had a project to produce a .net _kernel_. Microsoft doing some weird thing that obviously won’t work out isn’t _that_ hard to believe.
I think I would be more interested in Rust the language if Rust the PR sphere was not suggestive of certain all-powerful online influences that I've developed antibodies against. I'm not claiming that they're the same people that dig tunnels and launch satellites, just that my immune system is getting activated as if they were.
> Our North Star is "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code"
Can someone explain this? Are they suggesting that (eventually) one engineer can produce 1 million lines of Rust code in a month? Or replace 1 million lines of C code?
Using new "powerful code processing infrastructure"... but would it understand the semantics? Are those semantics clearly documented?
My read is Rewrite it in Rust™ for the whole MS native language codebase, but with AI doing the heavy lifting of the rewrite. Except the heavy part of the rewrite would be the review process, and I would hope they aren't trusting that to predominately ML.
It is reactive exaggerative marketing sloganeering Alan Kay ridicules executives in business class for having.
A paper on seL4 mentions $350 a source line of code on a 12 year engineering hour completed program that qualifies to a quality of code behavior expected from QNX.
That line doesn't even make any sense. AI usage for a project is binary (either it requires a person, or it doesn't, there's no such thing where an AI is good for a team for a team of three but not a team of two). And we can already one-shot really complex applications in seconds/minutes. Why the hell would it take an entire month to generate one million lines of code?
It really just boils down to AI writing a million lines of code.
I actually think it can probably already do something like where there's a lot of boilerplate code.
In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize.
In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable of making them try again and win. Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.
Now they have the Cloud, I'm not so sure the Windows division can turn this turd around this time. Xbox has tangentially been the canary.
Absolutely this IBM. In 1989, they owned the PC market. It was theirs. Of course the cracks were deep and deepening, but IBM still could have maintained a leadership of that industry to this day. Instead, they squeezed so hard the PC market fell from their iron grip.
The fact IBM still exists and is an important company is irrelevant. They lost control of the de facto computing standard. Microsoft could lose control as well.
Maybe, but the markets also shift. Companies evolve. Old products fade out of importance and new goods and services appear. Their company value has never been higher.
I'm not sure I would have liked a world where IBM continued to control so much - we probably would have a much smaller open ecosystem.
I mean, the stuff I was hearing about Microsoft over a decade ago was that they were giving up on the OS and moving everything to a cloud based SaaS model. Basically, focusing energy where the money is.
If you are at JPMorgan or aerospace today using quantum computing, there is a very good chance you are using an IBM Heron 156 qubit scalable computer. They have been pushing quantum computers into very large companies for quite awhile now.
Google is strictly in research mode, but doing a lot of good, hard work.
Can you give some concrete examples of “cheap young” contract workers being hired to work on product features? You seem to know a lot of things so maybe some concrete examples will help.
> Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.
A couple of quotes from the article above:
"WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce crashes."
"But Teams is not the only web app causing trouble when RAM prices are about to soar, as we also have WhatsApp. When WhatsApp debuted on Windows, it was an Electron app. However, Meta later upgraded it to WinUI/XAML (also known as native code on Windows), and WhatsApp eventually became one of the best apps [... using] less than 200MB of RAM and had smoother animations and faster load times."
It seems that most developers these days focus on web-exclusive technologies and try to force desktop and system level programs into this paradigm.
C, C++, and C# programmers seem to be as rare as hens teeth today?
Are colleges and universities not teaching these languages anymore? Is this a symptom of 'cloud-first' strategies where its easier to 'just use JavaScript' for everything, perhaps developer laziness/reluctance to learn another 'lower level' language?
I really don't understand the appeal of web-centric languages like JavaScript and TypeScript in the desktop and systems realm when they lack a standard library (which genuinely scares me: supply chain attacks...), likely contributing to the RAM consumption issue as developers just keep piling packages on for one specific function missing in another imported
library, and aren't natively compilable to small binaries that aren't dependent on a runtime or bulky embedded interpreter.
Yes, C# technically falls afoul of this (in .NET), but C# at least has a standard library that is comprehensive and is supported by an enterprise (Microsoft, for all its faults), not random developers on the internet.
Microsoft allowing key components of Windows 11 to be rewritten in web-wrappers is only going to drive people further into Linux, as the RAM affordability crisis continues.
Electron apps do are resource hogs, but that's not the reason teams is crap. Neither XAML the reason the Whatsapp app is good.
Developers focus on web because that's where the money is. Who would want to go down the Desktop road when it's less money and a dying field?
Similarly, IMO for making UIs, declarative is the way to go. A lot of these UI Desktop frameworks are procedural, which is a drag to write for UIs, and also, has many times less the size and support that, say, React, does.
Another thing is that hardware is always getting better. There is no incentive to increase performance if no one complains. A vocal minority of tech guys raving about how Electron apps are resource hogs don't dictamine what's performant and what's not.
I feel like this ‘cloud-first’ strategy will only get worse now that AI assisted development is common. I notice my personal AI assisted C# projects get far more complex than when I use some JS framework.
If it’s not the colleges and universities, you can bet the AIs are better trained on JS/TS.
I am sure why people are so terminally online to care about this. Like Rust for Linux is also here to stay and we can expect that in 10-20y a large portion of the kernel will be in Rust. Obviously the post was boasting, it was meant as a recruitment ad. They actually probably got a few decent candidates from it.
Adding rust to the kernel makes sense. Porting a million lines of code per engineer month is insane, regardless of language (it works out to ~600ms per line total, including review, testing, etc). Anyone who heard about that expectation and thought it sounded good is the opposite of decent candidate.
It has been approved as the same standing as C and assembly, it is there to stay despite what the haters say [1]. Linus is behind the push and for good reasons. Android keeps demonstrating year after year the benefits, at some point I don't know what else to say.
Just because something is beneficial does not mean it will be taken up by the community. My question is (and that is what I'm most interested in atm) what makes Rust's adoption inevitable? Are there people paying to make that happen? Are kernel level security bugs that big of a concern now that migrating to Rust is a pressing issue? Do you see what I mean?
(Again, just to clarify my comment: I'm not challenging anyone. It's just that there are hundreds of programming languages out there. Rust's been around for a good while. So, why now? And circling back to my original question, what makes its adoption inevitable?)
I think fundamentally it's because it's a better language than C and more pleasant to write.
Sure there will be a lot of old codgers who don't want to learn new things (surprisingly common in the tech industry), but eventually they'll retire or die, and new kernel devs will be very unlikely to pick C over Rust.
The security thing is definitely a driving force but I think probably not that much just compared to how much easier and more pleasant it is to write correct Rust than correct C (in most cases).
Absolutely. If Linus had said "Rust for Linux might go away" then you would have said "See! The creator and leader of Linux says Rust is going to go away!" but because he said it is here to stay you're saying "Pff, Linus isn't that important."
I won't quit my day job to become a detective because actual detective work isn't this trivial.
Hey let’s not put the Rust fanatics in the same bucket as the LLM bros. One is a safe programming language, the other is an overgrown lorem ipsum text generator. We’re not the same :)
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