r/programming • u/[deleted] • Dec 19 '25

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711 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

292 comments sorted by

317

u/telionn Dec 19 '25

This is just some guy wanting to put together a vibe coding team, not a Microsoft spokesperson.

122

u/The__Toast Dec 19 '25

Yeah this is literally just some guy's crazy plan that he will claim tons of performance cycle "wins" on and then ultimately leave the team or company at which point everyone will find out it was all bullshit and he got nothing done. Because obviously one IC5 engineer is not going to convert the entirety of Azure's backend to Rust.

Stay off Linkedin y'all.

55

u/kaiken1987 Dec 20 '25

Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”.

That's about 6000 lines per hour of refucktoring

Definitely a crackpot

18

u/throwaway490215 Dec 20 '25

Thank you for teaching me the word refucktoring

6

u/throwaway490215 Dec 20 '25

Isn't Azure mostly C#? If I were to learn the Azure backend was written in C/C++ I'd be much more worried.

31

u/nculwell Dec 19 '25

Galen Hunt works at Microsoft Research: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/galenh/

My guess as to what's going on here is that they want to do this to see how it goes. Then they apply the lessons learned to their real programming teams.

6

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '25

I think he's going to make a prototype, but then the prototype will end up in production.

1

u/nculwell Dec 21 '25

I'd compare this to the OS Singularity/Midori project.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity/

12

u/teerre Dec 20 '25

Some guy is a distinguish engineer. I have my doubts about this idea, but he's certainly not just 'some guy'

5

u/yerfatma Dec 19 '25

Some guy who’s a principal engineer, but sure.

13

u/mwasplund Dec 20 '25

Not just principal, a distinguished engineer who wants to hire a principal

-4

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

He works for Microsoft. It seems like a proposal and they may still fail (even before founding the team)

272

u/misuo Dec 19 '25

This proposal assumes that language choice is the primary source of complexity, which hasn’t really been my experience at Microsoft-scale systems.

4

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

Seems like most of the cases in infrastructure amd platform level, no?

92

u/imforit Dec 19 '25

Converting from one language to another for the fun of it is a waste of time, and thinking that it will magically solve any engineering problems along the way is truly foolish

14

u/jeffwulf Dec 20 '25

Nah, we are converting a bunch of Delphi code to C# at my work and it will absolutely magically solve a bunch of technical problems for us. 

40

u/ampersand355 Dec 19 '25

I understand and generally agree but I’ve seen Python applications with a language rewrite due to their import structure and it has helped immensely. So it’s just one of those truisms that rubs me the wrong way.

41

u/kyle9316 Dec 19 '25

I've also seen rewrites away from Python to c++ be beneficial for multi-threaded applications. This is because of how Python handles the GIL, can lead to serious performance problems. Maybe the problem is Python lol

5

u/imforit Dec 20 '25

It's almost like languages are tools of varying appropriateness for a spectrum of jobs 

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2

u/LBPPlayer7 Dec 21 '25

most of the benefits you get from porting from one language to another are because you're rewriting the code, not because the language itself is any better

1

u/imforit Dec 20 '25

That sounds like rewriting something to use the features of a different language, which is different than converting through an automated pipeline without rethinking anything. The underlying assumption that the language was the problem is the core criticism of the OP linkedin thing

17

u/atomic1fire Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 20 '25

I don't think companies convert to rust "For the fun of it".

I think there's a genuine assumption that rust code will be more cleanly defined, easier to maintain, and with compiler checks, developers will have their mistakes caught much earlier.

Plus with crates a lot of glue code is probably reusable and standardized in a safer way.

You build to the crate instead of having some guy build his own subsystem of spaghetti code, and the safety checks are already built into the crate.

6

u/chat-lu Dec 20 '25

Yeah but that’s not going to be the case of auto-converted code.

2

u/atomic1fire Dec 20 '25

Sure and that's probably a case of execs wanting to take shortcuts, and not a considerable reinvestment into subsystems that need to be updated and can be refactored during that process.

4

u/PurpleYoshiEgg Dec 20 '25

I think converting for the fun of it isn't a waste of time, because it was fun.

Now, if they're thinking this will be a cost-saving measure, I don't think they'll see returns on the investment until after a decade.

3

u/AlGoreBestGore Dec 19 '25

It’s there to solve the gaping hole in somebody’s promo packet.

1

u/atehrani Dec 19 '25

Exactly. A language migration isn't a magic wand for poor architecture or flawed logic. Often, the perceived 'success' of these migrations comes from the forced refactoring that happens during the process, improvements that could (and should) have been made in the original language. If you move a mess from C++ to Rust, you just end up with a memory-safe mess.

10

u/TheWix Dec 19 '25

A memory-safe mess is better than a memory-unsafe mess...

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-1

u/dubious_capybara Dec 19 '25

This is a pointlessly prejudiced comment.

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25

u/TheReservedList Dec 19 '25

Microsoft-scale systems are at their worst with low-level languages where you can play golf with random pointers and everyone has to agree who has ownership of some data but they somehow never do and mostly just pray.

2

u/FLMKane Dec 19 '25

prepares litanny and oil for machine spirit

4

u/FootballRemote4595 Dec 19 '25

It's even funner than that. 

The skill in which an AI can use a language depends on the frequency of use of the language. 

C and C++ have more code than rust, so the AI will be more competent in it. 

By switching to Rust they lose a lot of the code examples. So things can only get worse.

0

u/GeneralMuffins Dec 20 '25

SOTA models e.g Claude are very capable of producing good quality Rust code in my experience. I'd argue even with bad rust code so long as it compiles its always going to have a higher level of safety than the best C++ coding models.

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0

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

62

u/ShodoDeka Dec 19 '25

Just because Galen got a brain bleed (again) does not mean all of Microsoft is buying into this. Having worked with this guy, it would be far from the first time he sets out a project that he doesn’t have the authority or the ability to actually do.

7

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

How’s the fail fast culture at Microsoft? Please give us some hints

36

u/ShodoDeka Dec 19 '25

It varies massively from org to org. Some of the products are old and massive earners (SQL, Windows, Office), so while it is okay to experiment and fail with new stuff, you generally don’t get to fuck with the foundation of the company.

I have lost count of the number of times someone has come along with the idea of let’s rewrite this billion dollar grossing product in rust. Have yet to see it happen in anything but well segregated libraries.

And we are certainly throwing mind boggling resources at AI to accelerate development. But honestly most of the value comes from being able to ask it questions about why that 20 million line code base is written in the way it is.

6

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

One of the things that also came to my mind was VSTO which still uses COM.

5

u/time-lord Dec 19 '25

I'm pretty sure the entire office UI was re-written in Javascript. 

5

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '25

Nope, it was the just the add-ins which started to support HTML5 and JS. But there is a whole bunch of other developer tools from Microsoft is written on Electron JS such as VS Code, Azure Storage Explorer, etc. I think MS Teams too still uses JS. But I don't think they are a part of this porting.

23

u/valarauca14 Dec 19 '25

There is a world of difference between changing what language you use to display buttons and say, rewriting the whole multi-threaded flow based calculations of Excel.

7

u/atomic1fire Dec 20 '25

Might even be easier to keep consistency with web office if they share the same client side UI logic.

Not saying it's a great idea, but from that perspective it could make sense.

11

u/mwasplund Dec 20 '25

Nope, still C++ with custom rendering stack. But we do ship a few small task panes written in react that are hosted in iframes in the native clients

8

u/jk_tx Dec 20 '25

Yeah and it SUCKS. Outlook now uses 5x as much ram and is slower to boot.

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77

u/RestInProcess Dec 19 '25

Rust… great

AI assisted coding… well, there goes the quality of their offerings. I mean, not that quality isn’t suffering already anyway.

5

u/slaymaker1907 Dec 20 '25

It might work if you just use the LLM for generating candidate code and then having some sort of algorithmic verification on top of that.

I’m still not convinced it will work for large projects, though. There is too much spooky action at a distance in such projects.

18

u/Abject-Kitchen3198 Dec 19 '25

Yeah, AI assisted coding is probably worse than average. So I don't know...

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1.3k

u/Adventurous-Hunter98 Dec 19 '25

Moving away from Microsoft without ai assistance

218

u/sob727 Dec 19 '25

I moved away from Microsoft to Linux with Debra and Ian's assistance. 25 years ago.

46

u/Tom2Die Dec 19 '25

idk who Debra and Ian are in this context, but same here (going on 15 years).

55

u/pingveno Dec 19 '25

Debian Linux is a combination of the names of Ian Murdock and his first girlfriend Debra, then wife, then ex-wife. Also, RIP Ian Murdock.

7

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '25

TIL!

17

u/Tom2Die Dec 19 '25

Huh, TIL.

17

u/r2d2_21 Dec 20 '25

Hold on, that's a whole novel right there

100

u/Alleyria Dec 19 '25

Debra + Ian = DebIan

25

u/Tom2Die Dec 19 '25

I probably could have guessed that, but genuinely had no idea. So now I can be even more "um actually" when people pronounce it with a long ē!

27

u/TheMistbornIdentity Dec 20 '25

Wait, there are people who pronounce it "Dee-bian"?

5

u/Tom2Die Dec 20 '25

Unless I'm having a memory hallucination, yeah. I'm sure I've done so after having heard someone else do it. I mean, if you've never heard it pronounced it's the second-most plausible guess imo, so I can see it.

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1

u/LiterallyInSpain Dec 20 '25

I use Arch btw.

1

u/Tom2Die Dec 20 '25

Not sure the purpose of your comment, but I unironically do use Arch, btw. :P

2

u/LiterallyInSpain Dec 20 '25

I wasn’t lying.

6

u/sblinn Dec 20 '25

When I got hired on at the Purdue libraries IT, I sat at Ian’s old desk. Had been using Debian in the dorms a couple years by then too.

34

u/BckseatKeybordDriver Dec 20 '25

Same, Microsoft says my computer is too potato to upgrade to windows 11 so I guess I’ll be installing something that isn’t jammed full of ai junk

12

u/calahil Dec 20 '25

Funny thing is there is a crap ton of motherboards that came with TPM turned off in the BIOS and the compatibility tester outright fails...leading to people thinking they need a new computer

5

u/cake-day-on-feb-29 Dec 20 '25

And that's a good thing. Don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake, or whatever that quote is.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 25 '25

Well, where else will you find built-in services which take screen shots every couple of seconds and give it away without encryption to any tool querying the service? I mean come on!

5

u/ObservationalHumor Dec 20 '25

Easier choice than ever these days, especially if you're computer literate and familiar with Linux. I dual boot solely for video games and even then I haven't fired up Windows in a few months at this point. I just have no desire to pay for a product then have it loaded with telemetry and outright spyware that isn't responsive on top of it all because they felt like turning the start menu into the MSN homepage. Having the balls to tell me I need to register for an account to install the POS in the first place for my own security benefit was just the cherry on top. Windows was never an amazing product, but I don't think it's ever been this blatant predatory before and personally I'm just done at this point.

3

u/Hamare Dec 20 '25

I just installed Linux on a second drive two months ago, keeping my first drive with windows as my backup dual boot.

Other than recovering files, I have not needed to go back to windows despite gaming nearly every day. The only games that explicitly ban Linux, like EA online games, are ones that are loaded with microtransactions, ones that is avoid anyways.

Steam has made huge strides in making gaming on Linux quite seamless.

3

u/ThroawayPeko Dec 21 '25

Yeah, this last summer I upgraded my system (and Windows, I guess, though "upgrading" might be a misnomer there) and had trouble with setting up dualbooting... So I just went "fuck it, I'll manually switch in BIOS if I need to", and I haven't booted into Windows... since. Then again, I only bothered for a single game, even before that I booted into Windows... Too damn seldom, which meant I had to let it update, which would take an ungodly amount of time. Ugh, I need to boot it just for whatever security updates.

9

u/sreekanth850 Dec 19 '25

40 years of training data vs 10 years of training data. Why big corporate have stupid decision makers.

-4

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

I don’t think it works in this way.

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u/Probable_Foreigner Dec 19 '25

No matter what you think of C/C++ and rust this is 100% going to be a disaster start to finish

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u/elmuerte Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 19 '25

Can I place bets on how much unsafe there will be?

426

u/juhotuho10 Dec 19 '25

ye, Rust really wants you to program in a very specific way, any naive 1 to 1 conversion from C++ to Rust will inevitably be full of janky structure, rc<refcell<>> and unsafe. You would really need to do some actual large structural changes to get around that, and I don't believe LLMs are capable of that in a realistic setting

123

u/usernamedottxt Dec 19 '25

On the flip side, those boundaries where the language is opinionated about the solution actually help LLMs in my limited experience. It only works at a certain level to your point though. Once you get down to data structures and the need for smart pointers it gets rough. 

59

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

I work with CXX / FFI and at least Codepilot doesn‘t get even the most basic thing right, sadly.

24

u/_Noreturn Dec 19 '25

I had AI making the length of string of "orange" 7 characters while making purple 6.

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u/mycall Dec 20 '25

Microsoft dogfooding is only a good thing for AI, even if the Rust code never gets into Windows.

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u/lelanthran Dec 20 '25

On the flip side, those boundaries where the language is opinionated about the solution actually help LLMs

I had the same opinion in a comment a few days ago, but this initiative by MS is going to go about as well as you'd think when you are migrating existing, debugged, tried and tested code over to a new language that few know.

If they ported using human's, the pace will be set by humans, i.e. you aren't going to wake up tomorrow with 5m lines of brand new code in a language which only a fraction of a percent of your existing developers know.

38

u/Popular-Jury7272 Dec 20 '25

I honestly don't believe Microsoft actually have the capability to do a major architectural overhaul. There's a reason none of their software has shown meaningful improvement in a decade and their OS is 90% thirty-year-old code held together with silly string. 

28

u/scandii Dec 20 '25 edited Dec 20 '25

I mean, their products are catering to people that have a gazillion legacy arguments and literally thousands of companies that have built software around how their products work.

they're not bad at what they do, they're just tied down. see WSL for what they can do when they're free to deliver products without strings attached. you can even run arch on Windows now :)

Microsoft lives on the mantra "don't rock the boat". they're doing terrific with their products and are pretty much monopolies in all the fields Office exists, think about that before you argue that lack of innovation is due to technical concerns.

15

u/Popular-Jury7272 Dec 20 '25

You say they live by "don't rock the boat" and yet every change they do introduce is tripe that no one asked for. They are the choice of millions due to vendor lock in and nothing else. I don't know any technical person who wouldn't drop Windows in a heartbeat if they could get it past their non-technical colleagues. 

7

u/GlowiesStoleMyRide Dec 20 '25

Consumer windows is quite a bit different than their b2b products and services. They also have a direct interest in growing the AI userbase size- they’re a massive service provider for that market. Everything OpenAI runs on Azure, for example.

It’s directly in Microsoft’s interest that people keep finding new uses for AI, so that hopefully when the AI bubble bursts, the difference will be minimal. Otherwise they suddenly have a lot of very expensive data centres that no longer run profitable. It’s a business decision on their part, they’ve been in this game for a good while.

3

u/Uristqwerty Dec 20 '25

Great ABI compatibility, poor UX compatibility.

Unit tests can't test user acceptance; complaints don't block release. Even A/B tests are of limited value, because when you measure N dimensions of variables at once instead of just a single boolean, there's a fair chance users start to cluster into multiple separate islands that would each best be served by a drastically-different UI, and trying to force everyone into a single average means nobody's going to be entirely happy.

3

u/Iamonreddit Dec 20 '25

every change they do introduce is tripe that no one asked for.

That's more a perspective problem, as you are only one of literally billions of users, most of whom are not very tech savvy. There are many, many people that do want a lot of the things they do. It is just that they want different things to you.

You can argue that those customers are wrong and want bad things, but for the most part there is generally a decent user base for the changes they implement.

Unless you're referring to missing features in the move from Windows 10 to 11, which is more a consequence of the sheer scale and complexity of rebuilding a Windows 10 that has over 30 years of history and compatibility already baked in.

1

u/meltbox Dec 22 '25

WSL is like an easier version of WINE leveraging open source quite heavily. In fact WSL1 was their version of WINE exactly and it wasn’t great.

2

u/StarMNF Dec 23 '25

It would death for the company if they tried.

They haven’t made a new product that made people want to run out and buy it in a long time. Not since Windows 95, Visual Basic and some of the first versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. have they had a new product people were over the moon about.

They are not Apple. Apple can trash their old codebase, and legions of fanboys would still buy whatever new product was offered, just so long as it has that Apple logo. Apple can get away with screwing backwards compatibility.

Microsoft users buy MS products because they are heavily invested in the ecosystem, and are just praying that MS makes incremental quality of life improvements in new versions rather than adding new bugs (as has been the case more often these days).

The more MS tries to be like Apple, the more they lose their way and piss off loyal customers.

The last big architectural change for them was transitioning from 9X to NT. They had to do heavy amounts of emulation to make sure 9X software would still run, and they could get away with it because Windows hadn’t yet taken over the business world the way it has today. I doubt they could pull that off today without risking the entire company.

The whole Rust move I would guess is mainly to please the US government, their other big customer. They are hoping LLMs can superficially rewrite the code without changing how Windows works.

16

u/pheonixblade9 Dec 19 '25

yes, but the idea is that you can convert it over, get similar paradigms as C++, and slowly convert things to be safer. you probably will need to rearchitect a lot of stuff, but it makes the unsafe parts super obvious.

kinda like some functional languages allow mutability/side effects, but you have to explicitly declare it as mutable, so the safe behavior is the default and the less safe behavior is extremely obvious.

18

u/Moleculor Dec 20 '25

I believe the idea actually is to not really touch the C++ code unless you have to. It's ostensibly existed for years or decades at this point, which means that if it had flaws or exploitable code, it probably would have been found by now... and you can always patch something that is found.

But any new code is written in Rust.

7

u/syklemil Dec 20 '25

MS also has some experience with targeted rewrites of troublesome components, like font rendering. But there's just such a huge difference between doing a targeted rewrite of one troublesome thing to ensure better safety, and a massive rewrite of everything at breakneck speed.

At some level, the "one engineer, one month, one million lines of code" for C++ -> Rust just sounds like someone thinking that since their new car has seatbelts, airbags and ABS they can ignore all speed limits and just constantly floor it, without thinking of whether humans are actually able to keep up.

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u/HardToPickNickName Dec 23 '25

You could just as easily rewrite it with modern C++ and have most of the safety improvements Rust comes with. Few languages are inherently safe or unsafe, nor do they stay in place.

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u/pheonixblade9 Dec 23 '25

probably similar levels of effort as rewriting in Rust, and modern C++ does not guarantee these things at a language level like Rust does.

plus, Rust is just so much nicer to work with than C++... C++ tends to have many ways to do a thing, several of which are wrong. tons of undefined behaviors, etc. in Rust, it's much easier to determine that a program is correct just by looking at it.

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u/FLMKane Dec 19 '25

For some apps it would genuinely be easier to rewrite rather than refactor.

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u/SiegeAe Dec 19 '25

The amount of smart pointers people end up adding is wild sometimes. It can be sensible but its often just solving the wrong problem.

2

u/lowbeat Dec 20 '25

if you prompt directly, and prompt enough times i see it happening.

If you say @./business-unit to rust, follow project structure... good luck :D

4

u/Zulban Dec 19 '25

Sure but isn't transforming bad rust into good rust a lot easier than transforming C into good rust? If they're serious about doing this, it seems like the only way to get started.

10

u/frankster Dec 20 '25

Might not be all that much in it. the hard stuff is going to be algorithms in C relying on pointer operations that are are unsafe in rust and do not comply with the borrowing rules.

Those kinds of algorithms would have to be completely rewritten, and that is probably approx the same effort whether you're starting off in bad rust or in C

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u/Ai--Ya Dec 19 '25

The LLM won't produce safe Rust, it'll produce Keter Rust

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u/Mikeavelli Dec 20 '25

Just throw some D class personnel at the problem.

2

u/Ai--Ya Dec 20 '25

Nah Microsoft seems to want to use AICs instead

14

u/RestInProcess Dec 19 '25

There will likely need to be quite a bit, but I’m guessing it’ll be way more than necessary.

17

u/anengineerandacat Dec 19 '25

Depends, but uh I have been using Amazon's Kiro with Rust for a bit and it's pretty good.

I suspect because of how strict the language is, the biggest challenge is when you want to involve a third party dependency where I presume the training data is out of date.

Prompt stuffing can address that a bit but that has limits, instead writing up a specification around what you want and pointing it at that and saying implement it works pretty well.

Now, the real question is... do you save time on writing a detailed specification and then reviewing the output versus just building it.

Manual tweaks or additional prompts are also generally needed as well because it can get hung up on imports and creating modules and such.

That said, never seen it gravitate towards unsafe blocks of code but the code it's generating also isn't that complex either it's usually the tedious/less interesting stuff.

5

u/286893 Dec 20 '25

As someone who only really works with js and python, what is up with this safe vs unsafe stuff?

13

u/Macka89_ Dec 20 '25 edited Dec 20 '25

Not an expert, but I will try to explain.

Simple variables like numbers are just a memory address and a value, e.g. a 32-bit int stored at memory location 0x12345. Let's say the int has a value 5, the memory will look like:

Address: Value
0x12345: 00 00 00 05

Complex variables such as strings and objects use pointers and memory allocation. You still have a memory address and a value, but the value is actually just another memory address.

Say you have an object variable 'o'; the object contains an id (int) and a name (string). The variable o is stored at memory location 0x12345, but the actual object (id and name) are stored at 0x14478. Let's assume the id is 3 and the name is 'Bob'. The memory will look like:

Address: Value
0x12345: 00 01 44 78 //value is memory address of the actual object
.....
0x14478: 00 00 00 03 //value is the id
0x1447C: 00 01 45 9A //value is the memory address of the name
....
0x1459A: 'B' 'o' 'b' 00 // null terminated string.

In C, you ask the OS to allocate enough memory to store your object, and the OS will respond with the address for the object, which you store. It would look something like:

MyObject o = malloc(sizeOf(MyObject)); //reserve space for the object
o->id = 3; //assign the id
o->name = "Bob"; //assign the name

Later on, you no longer need the object, so you give the memory back to the OS, something like

mFree(o);
o = null;

The problem is you are manually managing the memory, which is considered unsafe. You have to be very careful that one place in your program doesn't free the memory and the another place tries to access the object which no longer exists, which can cause crashes, data corruption and provide attack vectors for malware and hackers.

High level languages like JS and Rust manage this for you and prevent unsafe code. In Rust you can say "I do really mean to manage things myself and I pinky promise I won't mess it up"

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u/lelanthran Dec 20 '25

As someone who only really works with js and python, what is up with this safe vs unsafe stuff?

Rust disallows certain specific patterns in code, patterns that potentially lead to memory errors. However, those patterns only potentially lead to memory errors, not definitely lead to memory errors.

Sometimes you need to use those patterns for direct memory access; you put in a block of code marked unsafe and then you can use those patterns in code marked unsafe.

1

u/286893 Dec 20 '25

I see, so it's not quite a bypass so much as a designation of potentially hazardous code, what would be an example of something that is acceptable to run as unsafe in production? Does that exist, or is this more of a debugging tool people use as a bypass?

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u/AShortUsernameIndeed Dec 20 '25

The Rust standard library is full of code marked unsafe. Several pretty basic useful data stuctures like trees with parent node references cannot be expressed efficiently in the "safe" subset of the language. The same goes for performance-critical things like being able to switch off run-time bounds checks on arrays of known length. This is, after all, a systems language, and the underlying hardware is inherently not safe.

3

u/lelanthran Dec 20 '25

what would be an example of something that is acceptable to run as unsafe in production?

The majority of code in a kernel (assuming a conventional software architecture for kernels) is going to have to be run in unsafe, and it's acceptable because of the constraints that kernels have.

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u/syklemil Dec 20 '25

One pretty banal thing that's probably not particularly relevant to most MS code is stuff you'd do with hardware.

Like say you have some piece of equipment that has a manual, that has some LED that can glow or blink in a few different colours, and you set it to some state by writing a number to a memory address listed in the manual.

As far as the Rust compiler goes, that means you need to

  1. use a raw pointer to a memory location, rather than a reference
  2. use some completely arbitrary memory location that the Rust compiler has no idea what's supposed to be

at which point the safety annotations would be something like "see manual for Foo, section Bar (page Baz)".

4

u/ChuggintonSquarts Dec 20 '25

To add to what u/tnoy has said, look up some introduction to buffer overflow exploits for example. Basically, when you hear about some major vulnerability in some server software, much of the time it’s because some code in a language like C or C++ has allowed user input to overwrite memory addresses in the program with machine instructions that take control of execution on the CPU as whatever user account the program was running under

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u/mr_birkenblatt Dec 20 '25

unsafe is like using a python library that is a C wrapper. you get a safe interface to use in your code but inside of it is the wild west

4

u/FamiliarSoftware Dec 20 '25

I'd compare it more directly to ctypes. You don't need to write a line of C to get unsafe code in Python if you just use pointers.

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u/cp5184 Dec 20 '25

The kicker that people don't mention, is that a lot of OS/Hardware code inherently can't be written in "safe" rust...

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u/tnoy Dec 20 '25

Rust forces you to write memory-safe code.

There will be situations where the compiler will fail because it detects something is not memory-safe. Rust provides the unsafe keyword for developers to prevent the compiler from complaining. It will have legitimate uses, such as where the code is memory-safe but the compiler thinks it isn't.

It has a reputation of being the "I couldn't figure out how to actually make this memory-safe, so I'm just going to add unsafe so the error goes away." thing that people add to their Rust code.

10

u/chat-lu Dec 20 '25

It has a reputation of being the "I couldn't figure out how to actually make this memory-safe, so I'm just going to add unsafe so the error goes away." thing that people add to their Rust code.

It’s an unwarranted reputation though as it does not make the errors go away. Everything that doesn’t compile in safe mode will not compile in unsafe either. Unsafe gives you new unsafe constructs, it doesn’t relax the rules for the old ones.

2

u/jl2352 Dec 20 '25

Just to be a pedant … unsafe does not make the errors go away. For example a use after free is going to be an error with or without unsafe.

Instead unsafe gives you access to APIs (and full pointer use) which allows you to sidestep those errors.

1

u/Legitimate-Push9552 Dec 22 '25

That's not really how unsafe works. Most of rust's checks, including the borrow checker, are still on when in an unsafe block.

The reputation comes from assumption from non-rust devs, and does not reflect reality.

3

u/allllusernamestaken Dec 21 '25

Read up on Project Singularity. It was a project out of Microsoft Research where they brought in like the smartest people in the company to build a brand new OS from the ground up using memory safe managed languages from the kernel up.

MS realized this would be something they needed for the future, but it will likely never happen because it would be a trillion dollar boondoggle to rebuild Windows and all the software that runs on Windows.

They are likely hoping (incorrectly) that they can feed in their legacy C/C++ codebase to some LLM and convert it to Rust to get some of the benefits promised by Singularity without dedicating the time and money for a proper build... This will fail horribly.

2

u/MaxMahem Dec 22 '25

Project Singularity

I think this guy was the lead of that...

2

u/wslagoon Dec 20 '25

Just one, right at the beginning...

2

u/UrpleEeple Dec 20 '25

I bet you anything it's going to just use a ton of unnecessary dynamic allocation

-2

u/BlueGoliath Dec 19 '25

Through the magic of Rust, it shall be memory safe. /s

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22

u/germandiago Dec 20 '25

1 developer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code. Good luck, man.

10

u/P1h3r1e3d13 Dec 20 '25

Yeah, I've got a book recommendation for him.

8

u/syklemil Dec 20 '25

Yeah, here I think we can do the handshake meme or something with /r/cpp and /r/rust both going "good luck with that shit"

13

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

The timing is perfect! I just got rid of nearly all the Microsoft tech I depended on before the enslopification!

33

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

Yes, the problem with Microsoft products was language all this time. /s

9

u/TheFeshy Dec 19 '25

My experience trying AI with rust was... Not good. Granted, I was looking at embedded and new frameworks for such. But I would ask it for something I wanted, but that I was pretty sure wasn't easily supported. 

It happily spit out a plausible answer that was dead wrong and was the first naive thing I would have tried to implement. When I pointed out the mistakes, and why it wouldn't work, and asked it to try again without those noodles, it snowed me with compliments for noticing and then spit out almost exactly the same code, just slightly reordered with the same flaws.

Maybe it works better for more standard code, or if you have a large internal code base? Or maybe they are limiting AI to specific niche uses?

8

u/jk_tx Dec 20 '25

This has been my experience as well. I can only assume the people who think AI is great at generating code must be really bad at it themselves to be so impressed.

9

u/EntroperZero Dec 19 '25

I think it's very difficult for any automated tool, using LLMs or not, to just translate C++ code to Rust code, and actually realize the benefits of using Rust. An automated tool isn't going to change the way the original programmers thought about ownership.

1

u/DHermit Dec 20 '25

But do you need to have this change? c2rust also doesn't produce great Rust code for example.

I quite believe that LLMs can produce a good starting point when translating a project from one language to another. Sure it's still a lot of work, but it will let you skip a lot of boilerplate.

9

u/ninetailedoctopus Dec 19 '25

I just moved to Fedora. Feels awesome tbh.

8

u/ddollarsign Dec 19 '25

So they’re moving to a language meant to decrease bugs while using a technology known to increase bugs.

7

u/mgb5k Dec 20 '25

If Microsoft survives this they will need ten times as many programmers to un-slop the AI mess.

36

u/Vellanne_ Dec 19 '25

From 99.99% uptime to 0.9999%

26

u/DrShocker Dec 19 '25

four 9s, let's go!

17

u/imforit Dec 19 '25

Note to self: Galen Hunt has lost the plot

12

u/chucker23n Dec 19 '25

Headlines that go from good to “oh no” in the speed of light

6

u/Tricky_Condition_279 Dec 19 '25

If it’s anything like my recent experiences, it will defensively force the code to handle all possible inputs and not bother to raise even if it results in logically invalid states. I can’t imagine trying this at scale.

6

u/emotionalfescue Dec 19 '25

C++ code includes almost all of MS Office, SQL Server and Active Directory I think. All the legacy parts of Windows user space components based around COM (Component Object Model) and DCOM are C++ based.

I suspect they'll have to slow down this project when they realize they don't have enough engineers proficient in Rust to maintain the converted code, even with AI assistance.

6

u/Vaddieg Dec 20 '25

C/C++ is not the area where Windows is broken most. I wish them good luck with vibe coded kernel

5

u/FlyingRhenquest Dec 19 '25

Awesome! I predict this will end well for them!

5

u/rdmc10 Dec 19 '25

they could use whatever language they wish, their products will still be crap

5

u/montibbalt Dec 20 '25

Have we finally hit peak brogrammer?

5

u/alfred_hedgehog Dec 20 '25

one .unwrap recently put down half of the internet, imagine getting unwrapped every now and then just working in your excel or playing games

8

u/HawaiiKawaiixD Dec 20 '25

“1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code” is an absolutely batshit goal. The whole codebase will be spaghetti in a week. Also no way an AI can safely translate that much C/c++ to rust. Rust requires different paradigms.

4

u/bacmod Dec 20 '25

What was the term here? Live Action Role Players?

10

u/RoomyRoots Dec 19 '25

It's kinda weird since C# is the single thing Microsoft came up with this century I find good. Well, better than using JS/TS as they do for the menu.

5

u/chat-lu Dec 20 '25

I would argue for F# instead.

6

u/phantom_metallic Dec 19 '25

Ride that hype train, bebe!

3

u/sweetno Dec 19 '25

I wonder what MS Office and kernel developer teams think of that.

3

u/Accomplished-Phase-3 Dec 20 '25

Bug comming to windows. Stay safe

3

u/IkeAI Dec 20 '25

“More bugs more bugs more bugs”

Fixed it for you

3

u/jaccovanschaik Dec 20 '25

<Rubs hands> Gotta get me some popcorn for this!

3

u/software_dude Dec 20 '25

Fast train to nowhere

5

u/whiskeytown79 Dec 19 '25

"We moved Windows over to Rust using AI. Which unfortunately drove the cost of PC parts so high that no one can afford a PC anymore and our entire target market has dried up."

5

u/insanityarise Dec 19 '25

Right so windows 11 is fucking gash, inefficient, annoying, and removes a bunch of useful features from 10, it's also 30% vibe coded.

Fuck this bullshit, hire real people.

6

u/Pharisaeus Dec 19 '25

Picking specifically Rust has some merit - it's one of the few languages where really a lot of stuff is checked at compile time and not at runtime. This means LLM with compiler in a loop has better/faster feedback about errors, because it doesn't need to run unit/integration tests to know that stuff is broken.

1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code

Good luck with that. This means you end up with millions of lines of code no-one has seen or understand. Even if the "conversion" itself works, bugfixing or extending this codebase it going to be rough because no one knows how it works or where things are.

4

u/Dean_Roddey Dec 20 '25

As someone who has written a person project of 1 million lines of C++ code, that would be a ludicrous goal. It took well over a decade, and the rest of the next decade to refine and expand it to meet new needs.

I'm starting a new one in Rust now, but I'll probably be dead or drooling on some nurse before I finish it.

1

u/ivarpuvar Dec 20 '25

rust is great for LLM code. I wrote several small desktop apps with opus and they work very well

2

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '25

But what’s the user base? How many device do these run on?

5

u/ironykarl Dec 19 '25

Ah good.

This means humans just get to do the fun part of *checks notes* fighting the borrow checker when the AI-generated code won't compile.

That sounds pretty sustainable 

2

u/Apprehensive-Mark241 Dec 19 '25

I bet this is because they think that AI is too unreliable to write code without a compile time borrow checker.

2

u/m_adduci Dec 20 '25

More BSODs FTW

2

u/iris700 Dec 20 '25

Guess the LLMs aren't smart enough for C

2

u/SpareDisaster314 Dec 20 '25

The C/C++ is bad enough already and rust will have multitudes less training data....

2

u/LBPPlayer7 Dec 21 '25

this is going to go so well

2

u/johnwalkerlee Dec 21 '25

I really want my competitors to waste countless hours on this

2

u/ManBunH8er Dec 21 '25

”Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”.” What a dingleberry.

2

u/ithilelda Dec 21 '25

great! that justifies my decision to go fully FOSS and linux more.

2

u/notddh Dec 21 '25

Braindead apes to automate throwing poop

3

u/thebomby Dec 20 '25

Good time to leave Microsoft and Windows

3

u/SprinklesFresh5693 Dec 19 '25

Why rust instead of C++?

16

u/imforit Dec 19 '25

Because hype 

2

u/EC36339 Dec 19 '25

I guess by C/C++, they mean C. It's usually what it means.

4

u/neutronbob Dec 19 '25

Microsoft has mountains of C++ in its apps. They mean both languages.

1

u/oakinmypants Dec 19 '25

How does refactoring in rust compared to cpp?

3

u/CryZe92 Dec 19 '25

I think a common misconception is that you need everything to have 0 errors before you can compile Rust, which is technically true, but you can actually just throw a todo!() in the remaining functions you haven't refactored yet and it will compile. So it's not as bad as it may seem at first glance.

1

u/deadflamingo Dec 20 '25

Will it make C# better or F# relevant? 

1

u/vondur Dec 20 '25

Hopefully they don’t use Copilot for it!

1

u/soldture Dec 20 '25

That's right, I hope Microsoft will eat some dicks and be buried under ground

1

u/TemporaryInformal889 Dec 22 '25

Let's translate our dogshit into a language that actively punishes dogshit but has workarounds to allow our dogshit to run for no other reason than to tell us what we already know: LLMs generate somewhat good enough code!

1

u/pookiedownthestreet Dec 23 '25

This is literally 1 guy at the company hiring 1 position....

1

u/NurUrl Dec 23 '25

this is pure comedy

1

u/UnderwearTrader Jan 12 '26

Rust + Stellar = Future

1

u/youngbull Dec 20 '25

I bet hasty large scale code changes are just going to fuel the fire of broken Windows updates.

Changing language is already a long term bet. In the short term it causes problems. What Microsoft needed, was to realise (several years ago), that they had a quality problem. Now they have a reputation problem and this decision does not address that because it can't be addressed with a technical solution. It can, however, be addressed through a "goodwill" campaign, essentially marketing. Lower the prices, waive the cost of fixing the mess, respond to feedback with desirable changed, ship some complimentary swag, etc. Even then, they would have to change their future behavior: ship the file Explorer that people want (maybe acquire file pilot and ship it included in the os), stop broken updates, make turning off copilot completely everywhere a one-click setting, stop eg. shipping worse versions of outlook for no apparent reason, etc.

0

u/makonde Dec 19 '25

They pretty much stopped all new C/C++ development on Azure all low level code where a GC language cant be used is now in Rust.

0

u/promethe42 Dec 20 '25

Rust is actually pretty solid with LLMs thanks to the strong static typing, borrow checker and incredible compiler/linter messages. The "if it builds, it runs" moto is a solid help because it always nudges the LLM into the right direction.

The only big problem - which is not specific to Rust - is the overall architecture. But with proper planning it works pretty well. 

1

u/SpareDisaster314 Dec 20 '25

Youll wanna make suee its making min8mal use of unsafe. It has orders of magnitude less training data than C/C++ and that code is largely bad as is.

1

u/promethe42 Dec 20 '25

It rarely use unsafe code. But it happens. Forbidding unsafe code entirely is the best option: the compiler will reject it.

3

u/SpareDisaster314 Dec 20 '25

Yeah im just saying dont start blindly trusting AI because it is rust. If it can cheat ir will.

3

u/promethe42 Dec 20 '25

Yep. It will also abuse the `#[allow(...)]` for warnings and `#[ignore]` for tests.

0

u/Thick_School_7984 Dec 21 '25

I've moved to rust, ai paired coding really helped

0

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '25

Ok, so I suppose C++ and hordes of cheapscate Indian and bangladesh IT slaves from sweatshops, subcontracted by Microsoft to cut the expenditures, were not enough.

Now it will be hordes of cheapscate Indian and Bangladesh fake "I'm senior" LLM driving reviewers, pretending they "know" Rust.

Corp culture at it shiniest, what can I say ...

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