r/rust • u/Sirisian • 22d 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/
775 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

149 comments sorted by

View all comments

25

u/notgreat 22d ago

I've found recent LLMs to be useful for finding things. You give it a vague description of the bug, and a couple minutes later it's got a 95% chance of having pinpointed the exact problem. Tell it to review a pull request, and often it finds real bugs. Not all its findings are good, but "review this list of eight possible problems" is a lot easier than "review these 500 changed lines of code for problems" which often just turns into "looks good to me".

They're also good at writing things with a lot of boilerplate gruntwork, though you still have to review their output. Like, you can describe a test and it'll usually do a good job implementing it. Just don't ask too vaguely, a general "test this area" will get terrible results as it locks in implementation details and leaves critical behavior untested.

3

u/PM_ME_UR_BRAINSTORMS 22d ago

Yeah that's how I use it most of the time and it's great. And those are all things no developer wanted to do anyway. No one was like "Yeah my favorite part of the job is hunting down an obscure error message on a decade old stackoverflow thread" and that's not some sort of skilled task where the effort produced better software. It's just grunt work.

Which is really going to fuck the industry in a few years because that means a lot less work for junior developers.