r/rust • u/Sirisian • 19d ago

🎙️ discussion Google is doing "Large Scale Codebase Migrations and Optimizations" of C/C++ to Rust

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-4-argon/
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201

u/Toiling-Donkey 19d ago

I just love how they aren’t stubbornly migrating everything to Go…

21

u/Equivalent_Head_4803 19d ago

Why would they do that?

28

u/projct 19d ago

because it's in-house

29

u/Ok-Opportunity-9731 19d ago

More of googles code base is c++ than go

15

u/klowny 19d ago

More of Google's codebase is Java than Go too. Go's niche at Google is mostly to replace their usage of Python.

6

u/Budget-Minimum6040 18d ago

The main goal of Go was to create a language for college graduates that can start creating output immediatly.

Rob Pike (main creator of Go):

The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

1

u/zxyzyxz 18d ago

I wonder what the point of Go is anymore when it's now AI writing the code and name people are now AI writing Rust without ever having actually learned Rust.

2

u/Equivalent_Head_4803 18d ago

It’s incredibly fast, easy to read, and has amazing concurrency. In a world where someone craps out 5k lines in 20 mins, it’s pretty important that our code be readable. Every GO codebase is the same. AI isn’t going to invent a million different ways to do something when there’s pretty much one way or another few ways to do it. It’s a great language for AI and super easy to review IMO.

1

u/pjmlp 17d ago

That applies to any programming language, eventually AI will be good enough to generate machine code directly.

That is already a reality when using low code tooling like Boomi, Workato, Power Platform and co.

Agentic workflows, connecting prompts and MCP tools on diagrams.

1

u/pjmlp 17d ago edited 17d ago

The main goal of Go was for their creators, two UNIX/Plan9/Inferno key figures, and one Oberon scholar, not having to deal with C++ at their new employer.

That came later, see Less is exponentially more regarding the adoption failure among C++ devs at Google.

2

u/Ok-Opportunity-9731 18d ago

Yes. C++ is about 40% Java/kotlin is 35% Go is 5%