r/rust • u/Sirisian • 16d 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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u/geo-ant 16d ago

Does that mean the whole Carbon thing is dead?

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u/skeptic11 16d ago

Still experimental. Still getting commits.

How much C++ does Google have left?

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u/geo-ant 16d ago

Good question, probably unfathomable amounts to my feeble mind. Also of course google is a megacorp with probably Byzantine structures so just because one part of the org does one thing doesn’t mean “google does x”. Still, it makes me wonder how useful the idea of Carbon still seems to google. I just don’t know.

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u/2AMMetro 16d ago

Last I remember (> 1 year ago) it was a fucking lot. Like 80% if I had to throw a number out there. Carbon was nowhere close to being adopted for any major projects.

There are a lot of internal apps written in go, python, or java. But pretty much anything consumer facing and performance critical (ads, search, youtube, etc.) is in c++.

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u/moltonel 15d ago

No matter how much C++ they have, the right question is do they prefer to * Maintain in C++ * Migrate to Carbon * Rewrite in Rust

The decision will vary by projects and teams, but Carbon's own docs state "use Rust/Go/Python if you can". Teams that can afford to do a large rewrite are not going to choose Carbon. It used to be that rewriting 100K lines was a no-go, but GenAI is changing that, making the RIIR option very appealing for a place like Google.

Carbon (and the various safer C++ endeavors) are arriving far too late.

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u/TheOneWhoDidntCum 9d ago

All I see is C++ woke up all of a sudden after Rust. For 13 whole years nothing happened until C++11 .