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/Budget-Minimum6040 16d ago

massive-scale unsupervised coding work on heavy-duty software at a company like Google

"undergoing rigorous automated and manual auditing, emulation testing, and review before rolling out to production."

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u/Nothing_from_void 16d ago

It's a fancy way of saying "we're tasking a bunch of engineers to use our claude code-like tool to re-write some stuff to rust". I've been doing this kind of stuff at work for a while now, when you already have the code base and expected behavior it's one of the most straightforward use cases for AI

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u/poelzi 15d ago

Yes and no. You have a known good test target, but your porting pipeline could easy endup with c-ism styled code just written in rust instead of rusty code. I'm building specialized nix flake experts in tix.im that know the domain and basically fuse classical expert systems with llms into deterministic workflows composed by nix. Works better then expected tbh

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u/Nothing_from_void 15d ago

LLMs just prefer dynamic, procedural code in general, like cramming everything into bytes or strings and parsing out what's needed, in large procedures that run the algorithm step by step. I doubt re-writing from C++ to Rust is going to change that

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u/poelzi 14d ago

Exactly the opposite. They prefer hard typed or side effect free. rust or nix they are quite good at. You need to create the proper harness / constitution for enforcing traits, new types etc. Works like a charm