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Windows 11 was released 4 years ago and you still can’t move the task bar to a different edge of the screen. If Microsoft can’t implement simple feature of a core part of Windows in 4 years they most certainly can’t replace their entire C/C++ codebase in 5 years
“Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases,” he added. “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
Easy to achieve if the ai just wraps all code in an
unsafeblock ^^Honestly migrating from one language to another night actually be one of the best use cases for AI, if you don’t change the architecture much it should be doable especially if it’s a well tested codebase.
Maybe if the languages are very similar. If you convert C to Rust using AI it might work well but will most definitely not leverage the unique features of Rust. Might as well stay with C in that case. Migrating from an object oriented language like C++ to a language with another paradigm (such as Rust) will most likely produce a burning pile of shit
especially if it’s a well tested codebase.
So not for microsoft products then.
In theory.
But there’s no doubt all their tests will also be shat out from an LLM.
That’s funny because using unsafe might be an hint that Rust is not the right tool for the job. Yet we have rust in the kernel, rust coreutils… I just can’t wrap my head arout it, yet.
You shouldn’t have said that. Now the rust zealots are going to come for you.
Got downvoted, here they come…
Unsafe is expected and necessary in certain situations. Using other languages doesn’t change that fact.
It’s talked about in the docs
Surely there’s no way for Microsoft to vibe-fuck their OS.
Surely.
Surely.
That’s OK. I’m using Linux. Perhaps this will drive more people to Linux. The less people using corporate owned tools the better.
“Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases,” he added. “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
This could have been good news, however, Microsoft’s insistance on using AI, and general incompetence even without it, makes me very doubtful this will be successful.
They are going to try and replace C and C++ written by actual experts a few decades ago, with Rust written by idiots. Expect tons of logic bugs, and very little measurable difference in memory corruption.
little measurable difference? the last time they rewrote something they replaced the start menu with fucking react
the difference will be measurable and enormous
Isn’t React technically safer for memory ? I was only talking about memory corruption, Rust’s actual main strength.
Don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely terrible that they shoved JavaScript in the start menu. It’s buggy as hell, but I don’t think it can ever segfault.
perhaps… i guess the single directional execution model would help to prevent memory leaks, and components would help keep things relatively contained… and also javascript in general avoids whole classes of c/c++ bugs… but it’s also incredibly slow. imo it’s just not something you should write core system components in
to be clear, it’s not react that’s the problem here: its execution model is an excellent way of structuring UI… but something as core as the start menu just really isn’t something you should fuck around with slow languages with
and also, that’s not to say that FOSS shouldn’t do it - they’re open, and thus something like react makes it easier for devs to write plugs and extend etc… but that’s not an engineering concern for windows: they don’t get the luxury of using extensibility as an excuse
All the black hats are going to have a field day uncovering all manner of zero-day exploits…
No no no you see, they’re using rust, which is a ‘safe’ language. That means it’s not possible to have security issues…
Replace the spaghetti with slop. Sounds like a great idea.
reimplement … with help from AI
Meaning, it will have more bugs and less features after.
I tried vibe coding a rust project and it was total ass.
AI doesn’t reason, so it heavily depends on what’s been presented in the training set.
Python is everywhere and most importantly whatever you can think exists in Python, from critical bioinformatics tools to somebody learning programming from the first time and posting their prime number finder or sorting algorithm online.
Rust? Not at that point yet, so the AI fails
Yeah, for everything I’ve seen it’s just a classical case of overfitment. I only tried it because it was recommended to me by a coworker. It failed at problem solving and choosing comparable dependencies. Completely jarring because like you said, it could likely do it in JS and Python. But clearly not Rust. I often wonder if the code you get from AI is +85% stolen verbatim.
JS and Python code is equally garbage.
In Python it can work but sometimes with crazy inefficient methods incorporated. In obscure geospatial stuff it often loses the plot. Still occasionally recommends functions that don’t exist
I dunno man, I tried coding a simply http listener with an LLM one time in python (a language I’m unfamiliar with). Just something to sit on a port, listen for a request, and run a script.
I ended up spending more time troubleshooting the maybe two dozen lines of code than I would have spent just looking up a tutorial online.
My experience exactly. We gotta just read the docs.
This is what you get when AI fanaticism combines with Rust fanaticism.
1 million lines a month is 2-ish line per second. That “engineer” is just someone to blame when things don’t work. They aren’t going to be contributing anything.
I was about to say that surely it’s not just 1 person they are talking about. Then I read, "Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
WTF
I mean, if this is true and it works it is not too far fetched. You’d mostly be checking that tests still make sense and that they pass.
Microsoft scientists have worked on a tool that automatically converts some C code to Rust.
The expensive autocomplete can’t do this.
AI markering all wants us to believe that spoon technology is this close to space flight. We just need to engrave the spoons better. And gold plate them thicker.
Dude who wrote that doesn’t understand how LLMs work, how Rust works, how C works, and clearly jack shit about programming in general.
Rewriting from one paradigm to another isn’t something you can delegate to a million monkeys shitting into typewriters. The core and time-consuming part of the work itself requires skilled architectural coding.
LLMs are - by the nature of how they work - only able to achieve 90-95% accuracy. That’s the theoretical best they can do, according to the people behind OpenAI. And worse, it will be presented as 100% accurate, even going so far as to make up sources wholecloth.
That’s an insane and completely unacceptable error rate for any system even pretending to be mission critical.
Can you imagine sending people to space with a system that has a 1 in 20 chance of just being completely unfit for service?
Well, in that case they’re overstating their capabilities. Which is not too surprising.
But when they don’t pass, then you have to dissect a bunch of AI pasta, right?
No, you go to your manager and be like: your machine to make C code into rust code does not work. If you want to keep the pace of 1M loc per month and keep your boss happy I need double pay and 10 people working on it at all time.
But when your boss tells you that you have to keep doing it this way, then you don’t have much choice in the matter. You either keep asking AI for new code and hope it gets it right, or you have to actually delve into the code and spend your time correcting it.
The 1 million lines of code is just untenable, assuming they want code that actually works.
Well, if that’s the case you do the job in the way you yourself judge best. Maybe that tool is good at some tasks and you apply it to that. Bill Gates will be sad for a couple months and then likely forget about the expectations which had been set and you yourself got a stable job with a safe position for years to come.
You’d mostly be checking that tests still make sense and that they pass.
Nah, my experience is most of your time is finding out what parameter or function call they made up because its mathematically a good answer.
This sounds like a great idea, I might finally be able to use Linux at work in the future.
Will this finally be the end of Windows?
Also fun fact: Windows uses a lot of COM Interfaces for API, which in my opinion often makes developing for Windows a better experience, than developing for Linux. Rust does not have anything OOP related by default, and are often emulated with macros instead, like in C.
I work for a company developing software for Windows and deal with COM all the time. How do you communicate across dynamic libraries and languages in Linux?
Linux usually just uses C API, most of which reads horribly. Libevdev is quite notorious for using files and the docs not telling you that the reading is blocking. Some additional things use C++ classes though.
Could you provide a link to the documentation? It’s strange that it’s so barebones.
Rust has traits and reference counting which map nicely to COM objects.
By the way, the Linux Kernel is OOP. That’s a good choice for things like queues, file systems, and device drivers.
That’s a crazy take. I hate com and oop with a passion. If you like com that much there’s gobject for you on Linux.
I hate everything GTK/GNOME, they didn’t even call it
gnobject.
so glad i switched to linux in time to avoid this clusterfuck. at least on my private machines.
Just fucking stop please
Yet another good time to get off of Windows
It’s always a good time to get off of Windows!
Be off fucking windows by 2030, got it.
You can be happily off Windows in less than an hour.
I truly believe immutable Fedora distros are the answer to windows. I spent years and years on Debian based distros. At the beginning of 2025 I finally switched my daily driver from Windows to an arch based distro.
Fast forward to October where I finally put Bazzite on my S/O’s gaming laptop, and shit just works. But the real kicker is that I don’t have to worry if upgrading her system will leave it unbootable.
Look, I love tinkering, compiling from source, and keeping a spare Linux kernel, but windows users don’t want that shit. They yern for flat packs and systems that you can’t fuck up.
Anyways, fedora atomic, 100% the new meta.
I really agree. I let my partner try out my steam deck (immutable arch instead of Fedora, but ultimately the same experience. Flatpaks and easy updates). They fell in love with it, so I bought a second one for them. It’s been a year now, running it almost exclusively on desktop mode and using it as a Linux desktop.
I haven’t even shown them the terminal yet.
100 fucking percent. I’m loving atomic distros more and more as I use them, despite having to work around limitations/recommendations against installing rpm packaged software.
Bazzite was actually the distro I chose when I bailed on windows earlier this year, and while I do have my complaints, it’s easily been the best desktop Linux experience I’ve had in multiple decades. I’ve tried a dozen or more times to go to Linux but my graphics card has always been the reason I went back. But between going green and using a distro that has both steam and my GPU drivers baked in, it’s been a fucking dream.
Like, I love tinkering, coding, and all that fun tech shit. But I also do this for a living, so I want my home system as set and forget as possible. I don’t mind doing troubleshooting on my servers and shit to make hosted services work, but something about having to troubleshoot my main rig just sends me over the edge.
Yep. Atomic doesn’t suit my needs outside of a dedicated gaming machine, but if I help my mom with a new computer, it’s going to have an atomic desktop with KDE. Close enough to windows that she won’t need to learn something new, secure where I won’t have to clean it out every 6 months, and reliable to where she can handle OS updates herself. I just need to be able to run an old version of WordPerfect for her in Wine and she has everything she needs.
Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.
Incoming brainrot-video from Bryan Lunduke in 3…2…1
(With react native)
