News Rustafarians (with the help of AI) take on the (establishment backed) holyC

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marees

marees

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The battle escalates !!

Galen issues clarion call — on LinkedIn — for followers to join Fellowship of the Rust

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marees said:
Linked In Lunatics


In a job listing, Galen Hunt, who has been with Microsoft for the past three decades and is currently a Distinguished Engineer, confirmed that his team has an opening for an “IC5 Principal Software Engineer.” But it’s far from a simple job listing. Windows Latest spotted some intriguing details on Microsoft’s careers and LinkedIn post.

In one of the LinkedIn posts, the company’s top-level engineer says:

“[Our] goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases.”

All of that might sound delusional if you realize Windows is primarily written in C and C++, but Microsoft insists everything is possible when an engineer can use AI to write more than a million lines of code every month.

“1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”.​

A single engineer and one million lines of code every month, and you’ll have “C and C++” eliminated from Microsoft. Microsoft is actively hiring such developers who would join the company’s “eliminate C and C++ by 2030” plan as an IC5 Principal Software Engineer.

“Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,” Microsoft’s Galen Hunt wrote in a LinkedIn post spotted by Windows Latest.


www.windowslatest.com

Microsoft building team to eliminate C and C++, translate code to Rust using AI, as Windows 11 adopts Rust

Microsoft has a whole team dedicated to eliminating "every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030," which includes Windows 11.
www.windowslatest.com www.windowslatest.com


https://twitter.com/x/status/2003626943477088403
Click to expand...
 
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marees

marees

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Apparently memory safety issues have been bugging Microsoft for the last 2 decades

Microsoft to explore using Rust​

Rust has been gaining in popularity and Microsoft intends to see if it can hold up to its demands.

Written by Catalin Cimpanu, Contributor
July 17, 2019 at 3:49 a.m. PT

The OS maker has been looking for safer C and C++ alternatives for years. In June 2016, Microsoft open-sourced "Checked C," an extension to the C programming language that brought new features to address a series of security-related issues.

In research presented earlier this year (6 years ago) at the BlueHat Israel security conference, Microsoft security engineer Matt Miller said that over the last 12 years, around 70% of all Microsoft's yearly patches were fixes for memory safety bugs.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-explore-using-rust/
 
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marees

marees

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Keep watching this space. This is not the end of the story

“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030” — Microsoft bets on AI to re-write Windows (Update: Microsoft says no.)​

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By Sean Endicott last updated 11 hours ago
A distinguished engineer outlined a "previously unimaginable" plan to rewrite millions of lines of code using AI agents and algorithms.


Update (December 24, 2025): It's Christmas Eve! So Merry Christmas to those celebrating. However, I have some disappointing news for Rustaceans out there. It turns out that this is just a "research" project at Microsoft, and not necessarily a goal for Windows 11, 12, or beyond, according to an update from the developer. Still, the previous claim of attempts to "eliminate all of C" from Microsoft by 2030 sounded a bit more like a mission statement than a research project ... Converting all of Microsoft's codebases, AI or not, did sound slightly unachievable to me ... but hey. The original article continues below. — Exec. Editor, Jez Corden​


https://www.windowscentral.com/micr...osoft-bets-on-ai-to-finally-modernize-windows


Microsoft has been shifting parts of its code to Rust for years. As highlighted by Thurrott.com, Microsoft started rewriting parts of the Windows Kernel using Rust in 2023. Even though AI hadn't exploded into the public eye back then, Microsoft was already experimenting with using LLMs to translate C and C++ code into Rust.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise and OS Security David Weston spoke on the transition to Rust last year. An Azure blog post by Jeffrey Cooperstein from 2023 explained several benefits of transitioning to Rust.

"Decades of vulnerabilities have proven how difficult it is to prevent memory-corrupting bugs when using C/C++. While garbage-collected languages like C# or Java have proven more resilient to these issues, there are scenarios where they cannot be used. For such cases, we’re betting on Rust as the alternative to C/C++. Rust is a modern language designed to compete with the performance C/C++, but with memory safety and thread safety guarantees built into the language. While we are not able to rewrite everything in Rust overnight, we’ve already adopted Rust in some of the most critical components of Azure’s infrastructure. We expect our adoption of Rust to expand substantially over time."

Cooperstein highlighted the "major investment" Microsoft will make over several years regarding the move to Rust.
 
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