The original LinkedIn post is pretty wild. I wonder if he did a fat line of coke before writing that, or if it actually were any concrete plans that have been worked out.
How is it wild? On social media I kept seeing things like people falsely expecting the end goal would require manually reading through a million lines of code. It seemed more like people making up reasons to be mad or trying to dunk on the author.
LLMs generate lots of security issues and bugs. Just being "Rust" doesn't automatically fix that. Generating that amount of code means no human review. How could this not end in obvious disaster?
You’re right about the impossibility of reviewing for style, clarity, and coherence. For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.
As a third-party developer in the late 2000s I remember my boss giving me a CDROM binder (binders?) of every single OS release that Microsoft had ever put out. I assume he’d been given it my his developer-relations rep at Microsoft. My team and I used it to ensure our code worked on every MSDOS/Win* platform we cared to target.
I expect that, internally, the Windows team have crazy amounts of resources to implement the most comprehensive regression testing suite ever created. To that extent, at least, you’d be able to tell if the Rust version did what the old code did even if you didn’t read the code itself.
> For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.
That hasn't been nearly the same goal for decades now.
For instance, Crysis literally won't run on win10 or later anymore.
On top of that, security bugs aren't the kind of thing you can automate away during a rewrite that no one has the bandwidth to actually review.
What makes you think any existing recent code added to Windows has been reviewed by anyone? This is the company that broke the start menu and the login screen in two consecutive updates.
They do still review code, but the first wave of layoffs in 2022 mainly hit principal engineers and above because some bean counters said "oh, these are the engineers that are costing us the most per head", so it's kind of the inmates running the asylum now.
And I'll say that their biggest sin was always that their code from the late 90s on was about 20% too clever for their own good. Kind of goes to that classic quip about how how it takes twice your brain power to debug code as it takes to write it, so if you were already maxing out just writing it, then you're not smart enough to debug it. That's half of why features seemed to get a 1.0 release, then get replaced with something rather than iteratively improved (the other half being FAANG style internal incentive structures).
Were all seeing the effects of them clearing house of their weaponized autism that was barely keeping the wheels on the wagon. They do review, but they don't have the ability to do it properly at scale anymore. Which makes rewriting everything even more batshit.
With this mindset I feel like you would also think bumping a C++ compiler toolchain version is impossible due to all the different changes to code generation that could happen. This is already done today and has similar issues where technically all the code can be affected, but it's not reviewed via a process of manually reading every line.
It’s significantly more straight forward to go from a higher level to a lower level representation than it is to go between different high level representations.
That’s not to trivialize what a compiler does, but it’s effectively going from a complex form to its building blocks while maintaining semantics.
Changing high level languages introduces fundamentally different semantics. Both can decompose to the same general building blocks, but you can’t necessarily compose them the same way.
At the simplest example, a compiler backend (the part you’re describing) can’t reason about data access rules. That is the domain of the language’s compiler frontend and a fundamental difference between C++ and Rust that can’t just be directly derived.
A compiler isn't using a statistical model of language more complex than anyone could understand with a lifetime of study to do its translation, adheres to a standard for that translation, and if you're important enough (and Microsoft internal teams are for MSVC), you get heads up on what specifically is changing so you know where to look for issues.
This is "lets put our postgres database on blockchain because I think blockchain is cool" level of crap you see in peak bubble.
There is a C++ standard that everyone writing C++ code follows and newer version are usually compatible with one another regardless of toolchain version. Behavior of the toolchain should not change. Worst case you can use deterministic, reliable tools to automatically detect problematic locations if there really is a behavior change. (compiler warnings/errors for example)
AI code generation is not deterministic and has no guarantee of behavior, thus requires review unless incorrect code is acceptable.
You don't have to use AI code generation to be what is generating the code or you could require some kind of proof of equivalence to verify the code that was generated.
> My 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
From his follow-up:
> It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended… with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.. Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.
So either he doesn't think that Windows is written in C/C++, it's not "from Microsoft", or he doesn't know what "reading between the lines" means, because those literally are the words he said. Sure, he also said "and algorithms", but I'd argue that inferring that to be a significant difference would require a lot more reading between the lines.
I guess he could also quibble that "eliminating every line of C and C++ from Microsoft" was supposed to mean new lines of code being written rather than existing ones, but that's both not the way most people would read it (if I said I wanted to eliminate all water from the planet, most people wouldn't think I meant I was eliminating rain but leaving the oceans alone) and a bit dubious from a technical perspective (since leaving the existing Windows codebase intact would make it pretty hard not to at least occasionally need to write a new line of code in the existing language).
I don’t understand this view point. How is anyone reading ‘way too much’ into the post based on what’s being discussed in this thread. A senior engineer leading a team at Microsoft saying that his goal is to rewrite/replace all C and C++ code with Rust using AI to facilitate the work is plainly saying what the comments in this thread are reacting to. No onenis reading into the statement, just plain reading. And even though it’s been edited since attention got focused on it, the post still says a goal for his team is 1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.
Further, this is not a random speculative post, it is an announcement for a job opening on the posters team.
Microsoft has thousands of senior engineers and one of them engaging in this project and perhaps hiring a small handful of people does not equate to a large company-wide planned mandate.
That is true, there is a lot of emphasis being placed on his post as though it were the embodiment of Microsoft’s goals and policies going forward. I was a little surprised that he is just a lead on a research team from the bombastic tone of the post.
I’ll own up to not considering that when I wrote my comment, still think discussing Microsoft’s seemingly head first dive into massive AI generation of code is entertaining, even if it is not really as important (or important at all) as it would be if this was a post from the CEO.
> Our North Star is "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code"
Can someone explain this? Are they suggesting that (eventually) one engineer can produce 1 million lines of Rust code in a month? Or replace 1 million lines of C code?
Using new "powerful code processing infrastructure"... but would it understand the semantics? Are those semantics clearly documented?
My read is Rewrite it in Rust™ for the whole MS native language codebase, but with AI doing the heavy lifting of the rewrite. Except the heavy part of the rewrite would be the review process, and I would hope they aren't trusting that to predominately ML.
That line doesn't even make any sense. AI usage for a project is binary (either it requires a person, or it doesn't, there's no such thing where an AI is good for a team for a team of three but not a team of two). And we can already one-shot really complex applications in seconds/minutes. Why the hell would it take an entire month to generate one million lines of code?
It really just boils down to AI writing a million lines of code.
I actually think it can probably already do something like where there's a lot of boilerplate code.
I think I would be more interested in Rust the language if Rust the PR sphere was not suggestive of certain all-powerful online influences that I've developed antibodies against. I'm not claiming that they're the same people that dig tunnels and launch satellites, just that my immune system is getting activated as if they were.
In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize.
In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable of making them try again and win. Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.
Now they have the Cloud, I'm not so sure the Windows division can turn this turd around this time. Xbox has tangentially been the canary.
I am sure why people are so terminally online to care about this. Like Rust for Linux is also here to stay and we can expect that in 10-20y a large portion of the kernel will be in Rust. Obviously the post was boasting, it was meant as a recruitment ad. They actually probably got a few decent candidates from it.
Hey let’s not put the Rust fanatics in the same bucket as the LLM bros. One is a safe programming language, the other is an overgrown lorem ipsum text generator. We’re not the same :)
The original LinkedIn post is pretty wild. I wonder if he did a fat line of coke before writing that, or if it actually were any concrete plans that have been worked out.
As a goal for 2030, it doesn’t seem that wild. Shoot for the moon
Rewriting Microsoft's 10s if not 100s of millions of lines of native code in four years doesn't sound that wild to you?
No? They will harness the power of AGI agents to rewrite everything in Rust. Sounds good to me.
One of the least fun things about a hype bubble is that I legitimately can't tell when people are joking anymore.
> AGI
That thing we don't have yet?
No, we have that. The thing we don't have is ASI.
Not true.
Sam Altman said it's true.
lol
Just toss an agent at it (tm)
>is pretty wild
How is it wild? On social media I kept seeing things like people falsely expecting the end goal would require manually reading through a million lines of code. It seemed more like people making up reasons to be mad or trying to dunk on the author.
LLMs generate lots of security issues and bugs. Just being "Rust" doesn't automatically fix that. Generating that amount of code means no human review. How could this not end in obvious disaster?
humans generate a lot more security issues and a lot more bugs, how could humans coding not end in obvious disaster…
If you're "producing" a million lines of code (that's 50K lines per working day) and not reading them, that's even worse.
My read was rewriting one million lines of code per engineer month using ML to do the heavy lifting.
Which is absolutely batshit. There's no way that can be reviewed properly, even if it's putting all of the review work on all of the other teams.
At some point velocity will slow down too. Figuring out edge cases in production to add or subtract a few lines, or backtracking from a bad change.
You’re right about the impossibility of reviewing for style, clarity, and coherence. For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.
As a third-party developer in the late 2000s I remember my boss giving me a CDROM binder (binders?) of every single OS release that Microsoft had ever put out. I assume he’d been given it my his developer-relations rep at Microsoft. My team and I used it to ensure our code worked on every MSDOS/Win* platform we cared to target.
I expect that, internally, the Windows team have crazy amounts of resources to implement the most comprehensive regression testing suite ever created. To that extent, at least, you’d be able to tell if the Rust version did what the old code did even if you didn’t read the code itself.
> For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.
That hasn't been nearly the same goal for decades now.
For instance, Crysis literally won't run on win10 or later anymore.
On top of that, security bugs aren't the kind of thing you can automate away during a rewrite that no one has the bandwidth to actually review.
What makes you think any existing recent code added to Windows has been reviewed by anyone? This is the company that broke the start menu and the login screen in two consecutive updates.
I've heard some inside stories from microsofties.
They do still review code, but the first wave of layoffs in 2022 mainly hit principal engineers and above because some bean counters said "oh, these are the engineers that are costing us the most per head", so it's kind of the inmates running the asylum now.
And I'll say that their biggest sin was always that their code from the late 90s on was about 20% too clever for their own good. Kind of goes to that classic quip about how how it takes twice your brain power to debug code as it takes to write it, so if you were already maxing out just writing it, then you're not smart enough to debug it. That's half of why features seemed to get a 1.0 release, then get replaced with something rather than iteratively improved (the other half being FAANG style internal incentive structures).
Were all seeing the effects of them clearing house of their weaponized autism that was barely keeping the wheels on the wagon. They do review, but they don't have the ability to do it properly at scale anymore. Which makes rewriting everything even more batshit.
Also the company whose start menu ads made the interface so laggy their "solution" was to just preload the bloat.
With this mindset I feel like you would also think bumping a C++ compiler toolchain version is impossible due to all the different changes to code generation that could happen. This is already done today and has similar issues where technically all the code can be affected, but it's not reviewed via a process of manually reading every line.
There's a nearly incalculable difference between bumping a compiler version and rewriting it in a different language.
A C++ compiler translates C++ to an assembly. This project would translate C++ to another language. It's not that different of a concept.
It’s significantly more straight forward to go from a higher level to a lower level representation than it is to go between different high level representations.
That’s not to trivialize what a compiler does, but it’s effectively going from a complex form to its building blocks while maintaining semantics.
Changing high level languages introduces fundamentally different semantics. Both can decompose to the same general building blocks, but you can’t necessarily compose them the same way.
At the simplest example, a compiler backend (the part you’re describing) can’t reason about data access rules. That is the domain of the language’s compiler frontend and a fundamental difference between C++ and Rust that can’t just be directly derived.
A compiler isn't using a statistical model of language more complex than anyone could understand with a lifetime of study to do its translation, adheres to a standard for that translation, and if you're important enough (and Microsoft internal teams are for MSVC), you get heads up on what specifically is changing so you know where to look for issues.
This is "lets put our postgres database on blockchain because I think blockchain is cool" level of crap you see in peak bubble.
Compilers are deterministic.
There is a C++ standard that everyone writing C++ code follows and newer version are usually compatible with one another regardless of toolchain version. Behavior of the toolchain should not change. Worst case you can use deterministic, reliable tools to automatically detect problematic locations if there really is a behavior change. (compiler warnings/errors for example)
AI code generation is not deterministic and has no guarantee of behavior, thus requires review unless incorrect code is acceptable.
>AI code generation is not deterministic
You don't have to use AI code generation to be what is generating the code or you could require some kind of proof of equivalence to verify the code that was generated.
From the initial post:
> My 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
From his follow-up:
> It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended… with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.. Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.
So either he doesn't think that Windows is written in C/C++, it's not "from Microsoft", or he doesn't know what "reading between the lines" means, because those literally are the words he said. Sure, he also said "and algorithms", but I'd argue that inferring that to be a significant difference would require a lot more reading between the lines.
I guess he could also quibble that "eliminating every line of C and C++ from Microsoft" was supposed to mean new lines of code being written rather than existing ones, but that's both not the way most people would read it (if I said I wanted to eliminate all water from the planet, most people wouldn't think I meant I was eliminating rain but leaving the oceans alone) and a bit dubious from a technical perspective (since leaving the existing Windows codebase intact would make it pretty hard not to at least occasionally need to write a new line of code in the existing language).
The simple fact that they have to deny it, meaning such an absurd is widely considered plausible, is already a sign of their reputation.
Have you used Microsoft software lately? After they fired the testing people a few years ago, the number of regressions I find at work is nuts.
Nah. It's only a sign that people read way too much into random speculative Linkedin posts.
I don’t understand this view point. How is anyone reading ‘way too much’ into the post based on what’s being discussed in this thread. A senior engineer leading a team at Microsoft saying that his goal is to rewrite/replace all C and C++ code with Rust using AI to facilitate the work is plainly saying what the comments in this thread are reacting to. No onenis reading into the statement, just plain reading. And even though it’s been edited since attention got focused on it, the post still says a goal for his team is 1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.
Further, this is not a random speculative post, it is an announcement for a job opening on the posters team.
Microsoft has thousands of senior engineers and one of them engaging in this project and perhaps hiring a small handful of people does not equate to a large company-wide planned mandate.
That is true, there is a lot of emphasis being placed on his post as though it were the embodiment of Microsoft’s goals and policies going forward. I was a little surprised that he is just a lead on a research team from the bombastic tone of the post.
I’ll own up to not considering that when I wrote my comment, still think discussing Microsoft’s seemingly head first dive into massive AI generation of code is entertaining, even if it is not really as important (or important at all) as it would be if this was a post from the CEO.
Gee whiz, what an interesting way of thinking. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
Too bad they aren't Google and announced in on April fool's and get to claim that it was just a joke if it turns out it didn't land well.
> Our North Star is "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code"
Can someone explain this? Are they suggesting that (eventually) one engineer can produce 1 million lines of Rust code in a month? Or replace 1 million lines of C code?
Using new "powerful code processing infrastructure"... but would it understand the semantics? Are those semantics clearly documented?
My read is Rewrite it in Rust™ for the whole MS native language codebase, but with AI doing the heavy lifting of the rewrite. Except the heavy part of the rewrite would be the review process, and I would hope they aren't trusting that to predominately ML.
they probably would using AI to review the code also, like cmon this is MS we talking about
That line doesn't even make any sense. AI usage for a project is binary (either it requires a person, or it doesn't, there's no such thing where an AI is good for a team for a team of three but not a team of two). And we can already one-shot really complex applications in seconds/minutes. Why the hell would it take an entire month to generate one million lines of code?
It really just boils down to AI writing a million lines of code.
I actually think it can probably already do something like where there's a lot of boilerplate code.
I think I would be more interested in Rust the language if Rust the PR sphere was not suggestive of certain all-powerful online influences that I've developed antibodies against. I'm not claiming that they're the same people that dig tunnels and launch satellites, just that my immune system is getting activated as if they were.
Just say what you mean
Part of me wonders if this whole post was sarcasm/irony. A frustrated engineer’s projection of what upper management wants engineers to believe?
Will the AI let me make my taskbar vertical again?
This whole thing is hilarious.
In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize.
In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable of making them try again and win. Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.
Now they have the Cloud, I'm not so sure the Windows division can turn this turd around this time. Xbox has tangentially been the canary.
Xbox was poised to be an earthquake to the video game industry but they squandered with the execution. Hence the layoffs to quell the market.
The rest of Microsoft might go the same way. I guess now I know what it felt like looking at IBM in 1989.
That it got to this point is hilarious
So Windows 12 is
I am sure why people are so terminally online to care about this. Like Rust for Linux is also here to stay and we can expect that in 10-20y a large portion of the kernel will be in Rust. Obviously the post was boasting, it was meant as a recruitment ad. They actually probably got a few decent candidates from it.
What makes it inevitable?
Good question, it’s not. You're responding to just another Rust and/or LLM fanatic claiming they can predict the future. Dime a dozen on this board.
Hey let’s not put the Rust fanatics in the same bucket as the LLM bros. One is a safe programming language, the other is an overgrown lorem ipsum text generator. We’re not the same :)
The fact that you’re both getting lumped in the same shill bucket together should give you pause.
Yes, I paused to comment and moved on