The linkedin post this is based on sounds like a troll/joke/fake/mental episode.
Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030
Submitted 11 hours ago by hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/24/microsoft_rust_codebase_migration
Comments
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 55 minutes ago
FarceOfWill@infosec.pub 1 hour ago
Somebody got yelled at
tal@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft distinguished engineer Galen Hunt wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.
“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.’”
Well, I expect it’ll be exciting, one way or another.
HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 3 hours ago
“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.’”
That’s insane. Even a good engineer will frequently need years to fully understand one million lines of code - even if the code is organized very, very well.
To compare, one million lines of program code might have around 200000 important symbols whose meaning and complex connections one has to learn and memorize. That’s far more than the average vocabulary one will learn in five years when learning a foreign language to a high skill level. Doing it in a month would be like learning to read and write fine Japanese or Arab literature in a month when you have never spoken a word in that language before.
msage@programming.dev 2 hours ago
Kinda still your point, but if you have one engineer producing 1M SLOC, how many do you have for code review?
I hate how everyone nowadays is acting like reviews are not important. Actual oversight over codebase is way less important than shipping random code. Which is insane.
plz1@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
You know it’s going to be successful when they go back to using antiquated productivity measurements like measuring based on lines of code in a time frame. We all know AI is fucking spectacular at generating overly verbose code.
edgemaster72@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Well, I expect it’ll be exciting, one way or another.
This gives the curse “may you live in interesting times” vibes
umbrella@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
they are speedrunning enshitification 🐧
Iunnrais@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Enshittification does not mean making things suck in general. It specifically means the business model of making a good product for users, then making the product bad for users and good for advertisers or data purchasers or retailers or whatever, and then when you have a captured market, making it worse for everyone to squeeze more money faster.
Microsoft is not doing this. They might be sucking, and making a worse product, but it’s not following the enshittification playbook.
architect@thelemmy.club 4 hours ago
Be off fucking windows by 2030, got it.
BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
You can be happily off Windows in less than an hour.
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 37 minutes ago
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.
HazardousBanjo@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I look forward to the total and complete collapse of Microsoft in the computer marketplace.
DeuxChevaux@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
A vibe coded Windows 12. Sounds… interesting, mildly…
tonytins@pawb.social 10 hours ago
Plans move to Rust, with help from AI
As if AI could handle the mountains of checks Rust has you account for.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
AI: This is unsafe. This is also unsafe. This third one? Unsafe.
tal@lemmy.today 7 hours ago
While I agree that I don’t think that an LLM is going to do the heavy lifting there, I assume that Rust has some way of overriding type-induced checks. If your goal is just to get to a mechanically-equivalent-to-C++ Rust version, rather than making full use of its type system to try to make the code as correct as possible, you could maybe do that. It could provide the benefit of a starting place to start using the type system to do additional checks.
Miaou@jlai.lu 59 minutes ago
If they rely on UB at all, then this won’t work. At they you get a compile time error, but more likely your rust program will do weird stuff with memory. And given how much people rely on compilers “acting nice” when it comes to aliasing (something rust does not fuck around with), I wouldn’t hold my breathe
MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
The safety designed into Rust is suddenly foreign to the C family that I’m honestly not sure you can do that. Even “unsafe” Rust doesn’t completely switch off the enforced safety
goatinspace@feddit.org 5 hours ago
mEEGal@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
What’s this show ?
milk@discuss.tchncs.de 2 hours ago
Parks and Recreation
Klnsfw@lemmynsfw.com 2 hours ago
Parks & Recreation
mech@feddit.org 10 hours ago
Honestly, Microsoft should just take the L, develop Windows 12 based on a Linux kernel, and re-write most of their stuff from scratch.
After focussing on backwards-compatibility for 40 years, they’re allowed a new start, to fix all the rotten code they inherited from the 1980’s.underscores@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Oh, God I would hate that.
I don’t want microshit software to become a standard in Linux.
What Microsoft needs to do is keep pushing AI as much as possible until it burns itself to the ground.
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
That would make a lot of sense, which is why they are going to do something else.
darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
It seems like the actual windows kernel isn’t that bad, it’s mainly all the stuff on top of it at this point that is killing the OS
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Which they could clean up, but it would mean killing backwards compatibility, which is arguably the only selling point of Windows.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
and they have decades of closed drivers written for it.
spongebue@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Shit, with the way computer horsepower has improved over the years, how hard can it be to add a legacy Windows emulator or whatever WINE is, especially when you have the original source code available?
orclev@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
WINE is basically an adapter. It exposes a Windows API and calls the equivalent Linux APIs when invoked. That’s less overhead than an emulator which models an entire virtual piece of hardware. When you run a Windows program through WINE your computer is actually executing the code of the program just like any Linux one it’s just calling WINE libraries instead of the Windows ones it normally would.
ark3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
A man can wish but they would never do that because of GPL and thus having to also open source anything built-in/in-top by them (afaik?)
markz@suppo.fi 9 hours ago
Not really. Android and the google layer on top is a pretty good example of what you can do.
orclev@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
They would only be obliged to open source any extra code they added to the kernel. If whatever they add lives in user space then it can be closed source (that’s one of the key differences between GPL 2 and 3 and why Linus refuses to use GPL 3). That said the problem with Windows at this point isn’t really the kernel, it’s all the user space crap they built on top of it.
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
I remember that rumor for windows 11, I was really hopeful.
I don’t think they really make money in windows itself.
Why don’t they just come to linux and sell their server stuff there to keep people in that ecosystem?
zbyte64@awful.systems 6 hours ago
I’m skeptical they could do it in a way that inherits stability from Linux. Imagine bolting on their service control on top of systemd or map their registry system to /etc. They either bring all the bad over to Linux or write something that doesn’t support the windows ecosystem.
pyrinix@kbin.melroy.org 7 hours ago
After focusing on backwards-compatibility for 40 years
Lack of, you mean.
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Er, no. A Linux program from five years ago probably won’t run on a current distro if it hasn’t been maintained in four years. A Windows program released twenty years ago and never patched has pretty good odds of running on Win10 without even needing to touch the compatibility tab.
Malcolm@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Get out your popcorn because this should be fun to watch. They’re already vibe coding all of the value and stability out of their OS.
As someone who only still has a Window install because Wine can’t handle the CAD tools I rely on, I look forward to the day when Linux becomes a more attractive platform to release professional software for. I’m not holding my breath for the Year of the Linux Desktop but I can certainly enjoy the ride of MS’s self sabotage to get there.
muhyb@programming.dev 3 hours ago
Have you tried Winboat? Don’t know about CAD but it can handle Photoshop well.
BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
WinBoat is amazing, but it doesn’t have GPU passthrough yet. That one feature is the holy grail for Windows virtualization on Linux. I hope the WinBoat team can solve it.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Perfect plan, I’m sure there will be no problems
db2@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Probably with AI slop because they got really stupid really fast in Redmond.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
will MS even last that long towing AI behind them.
db2@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
They’re not even towing it, they’re putting it in the lead fully and just dumbly trusting whatever direction it’s going.
pyrinix@kbin.melroy.org 7 hours ago
And by which point, by 2032 when my Windows 10 stops updating completely (finally). May just be the time I finally go to Linux.
TownhouseGloryHole@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Just do it now. It feels so good and everyone’s doing it.
MBech@feddit.dk 1 hour ago
I can’t play stuff that requires kernal level anticheat (I know I know, “stop playing those game” no, fuck off). When I can actually play all the games I use to socialise with my very limited amount of friends, sure, but until then, for my use case, Linux is just not good.
wewbull@feddit.uk 2 hours ago
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.
ranzispa@mander.xyz 1 hour ago
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.