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reimplement … with help from AI
Meaning, it will have more bugs and less features after.
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 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 linkedin post this is based on sounds like a troll/joke/fake/mental episode.
Somebody got yelled at Edit: seeing as theres no embed, the same guy put up something about this was a research prject and, hah, of course theyre not porting windows to rust.
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.
What’s this show ?
Parks and Recreation
Parks & Recreation
Perfect plan, I’m sure there will be no problems
A vibe coded Windows 12. Sounds… interesting, mildly…
I look forward to the total and complete collapse of Microsoft in the computer marketplace.
“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.
“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 100000 to 200000 unique symbols whose meaning and complex connections an engineer working with it 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.
The Linux kernel has now passed 40 million lines of code, written over 30 years by tens of thousands of master programmers. And that’s kind of a historic achievement. What happens is that complexity increases sharply with each duplication of the amount of code.
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.
GitHub Copilot performs PR reviews now doesn’t it
Yeah, that’s exactly what we need.
LLM producing the code
LLM approving the change
LLM agent pushing to prod
Then wonder why the users are gone
It’s not great.
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.
Well, I expect it’ll be exciting, one way or another.
This gives the curse “may you live in interesting times” vibes
they are speedrunning enshitification 🐧
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.
points to ads in the start menu and surveillance in the OS
Pardon me, but that is exactly what MS is doing.
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.
Have you tried Winboat? Don’t know about CAD but it can handle Photoshop well.
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.
I’m afraid that’s going to be a long way off.
KVM can do it, but usually only to one kernel. Not sure if you can have multiple kernels handling one GPU.
Plans move to Rust, with help from AI
As if AI could handle the mountains of checks Rust has you account for.
AI: This is unsafe. This is also unsafe. This third one? Unsafe.
While I agree that I don’t think that an LLM is going to do the heavy lifting of making full use of Rust’s type system, 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.
unsafe { <the whole codebase> }If they rely on UB at all, then this won’t work. At best 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
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
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 focusing on backwards-compatibility for 40 years, they’re allowed a new start, to fix all the rotten code they inherited from the 1980’s.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.
That would make a lot of sense, which is why they are going to do something else.
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
Which they could clean up, but it would mean killing backwards compatibility, which is arguably the only selling point of Windows.
and they have decades of closed drivers written for it.
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?
I’m skeptical they could do it in a way that meaningfully 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.
They could do what Apple did when they replaced the old MacOS with UNIX, which is they shipped an emulator for a while that was integrated really well. They also had a sort of backwards compatible API that made porting apps a bit easier (now removed, it died with 32 bit support).
But in the Windows world, third party drivers are much more important. So in that regard it would be more difficult. Especially if they’re not fully behind it. As soon as they waver and there is some way to keep using traditional Windows, the result will be the same as when they tried to slim down the Windows API on ARM, and then nobody moved away from the APIs that were removed because they still worked on x86, which significantly slowed adoption for Windows on ARM.
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?
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.
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?)
Not really. Android and the google layer on top is a pretty good example of what you can do.
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.
Even then, they can just have an open source shim and a binary blob for the driver, a la Nvidia.
After focusing on backwards-compatibility for 40 years
Lack of, you mean.
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.
Probably with AI slop because they got really stupid really fast in Redmond.
will MS even last that long towing AI behind them.
They’re not even towing it, they’re putting it in the lead fully and just dumbly trusting whatever direction it’s going.
And by which point, by 2032 when my Windows 10 stops updating completely (finally). May just be the time I finally go to Linux.
Just do it now. It feels so good and everyone’s doing it.
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.
