Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase
www.theregister.com
: Plans move to Rust, with help from AI
  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    5·
    52 minutes ago

    Tech bosses have well and truly lost it.

    Consider that:

    • Code is primarily to communicate from human-to-human, and only incidentally for computers to execute
    • A codebase that is 30+ years old has an absolute shitload of learnings incorporated into it, much of it very subtle
    • Languages are, in fact, different. So some things cannot be directly translated with exactly the same semantics, so devs will need to fully understand the intent and resolve ambiguities
    • A million lines per month is a lot of text for someone to successfully interpret and translate without losing any subtleties
    • SpicyLizards@reddthat.com
      2·
      13 minutes ago

      And 1 million lines to truly review. Reviewers are used to their own heuristics based on common and critical mistakes to find errors. I reckon AI errors won’t follow familair patterns, making reviews even more tedious.

  • Avicenna@programming.dev
    1·
    22 minutes ago

    this seems like a research project rather than a main line policy change:

    "Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.

    My team’s project is a research project. We are building tech to make migration from language to language possible."

    Ofcourse the end goal remains the same: try to produce systems that can be maintained by a significantly reduced number of programmers/software engineers, which can only work if AGI was actually achieved in near future so that the senior coder gap produced by this approach can be filled by AGI coders. If not, I think we will enter an era of tech where first software engineering will first become highly undesirable (due to reduced number of entry level jobs) and then achieve a god-like status because there are not enough senior software engineers to support all the tech infrastructure build on AI coding agents which are not fully autonomous because they lack/can’t learn critical reasoning skills/software experience unlike entry level coders which can.

  • elgordino@fedia.io
    13·
    3 hours ago

    “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’

    What could possibly go wrong