Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase
www.theregister.com
: Plans move to Rust, with help from AI
  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    12·
    4 hours 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
      7·
      4 hours 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.

      • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        Yeah…

        Human mistakes tend to 1) look like mistakes, and 2) are surrounded by lots of hints that the author had trouble with that section of code.

        AI mistakes tend to 1) look like regular code, and 2) look just as confident and effort-ful as the rest of the code.