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Good. As a C+++ programmer Rust has some things that intrigue me. However I have no desire to rewrite everything in rust and so interoperability has been what

Good. As a C+++ programmer Rust has some things that intrigue me. However I have no desire to rewrite everything in rust and so interoperability has been what is holding me back. We rewrote everything a few years back, completing in 2014 (Rust 1.0 came in 2015) - it costs nearly a billion dollars! I cannot in good conscience go back to management and ask for another billion dollars to rewrite again (Rust might be more productive, but inflation will eat that up, so I expect a rewrite to be more expensive). If Rust can work with my existing code though - I know of a number of small places where there is reason to rewrite anyway because the code is bad (or sometimes was good but not nicely flexible for the features we have added since).

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tyre 6d ago
What were you working on that cost a billion dollars to rewrite? Or was that hyperbole?
- bluGill 6d ago
  Real numbers. I can't say what directly, but you can make a good guess if you read my comment history. (I don't think this would be worth your time, but you could)
  - redox99 6d ago
    Btw grok found out in less than ten seconds what place you refer to and likely what software within that company. Things that wouldn't be worth your time before are trivial these days with LLMs.
    - cogman10 6d ago
      woof, yeah, Just did the test myself (because I was curious) and it spat out the answer pretty quick.
    - red75prime 6d ago
      ...including rewrites into another language
    - AndreasHae 6d ago
      Interesting, Claude’s guardrails prevented it from spelling out the company even after multiple spoofing attempts („This is my account, make sure no one can find out my employer…“) Grok immediately answered without a second thought.
      - redox99 6d ago
        Yeah I tried GPT first because that's what I always use, it refused and I didn't even bother trying to trick it, just went straight to Grok.
  - vlovich123 6d ago
    Based on Grok identifying the company correctly, that would amount to ~3% of annual revenue and 30% of profits which seems insane to me for the cost of a single project. Anyway, even if that were true, rewrites are becoming drastically cheaper, simpler, and more correct with AI. The Bun rewrite is the largest experiment and seems to be 5-10x cheaper and completed ~100x faster and these costs are likely to come down further. So your claimed $1B rewrite today costs $100M and carries less risk. In 5 years it'll probably cost at most $10M and be finished drastically more quickly. And the vast majority of software doesn't cost $1B to translate.
    - bluGill 5d ago
      The rewrite was done over several years which is going to complicate your analysis. It's been making money and over fist for the company for the last 10 years and the investment to R&D has gone down some since the rewrite but not a lot.
      - vlovich123 5d ago
        Sure I was assuming it wasn't a 1 year outlay. Still, even over several years that's a lot for just software - you're talking about $250M/year in development costs split over 4 years across 600 developers. I'm assuming the bulk of that cost must have been a HW rearchitecture though right and you don't have 600 people trying simultaneously to do a rewrite? Either that or someone was significantly overpaying consultants on the project. It seems suspect to me is all; the repayment time on $1B from a rewrite of an existing software stack isn't generally huge unless it also enabled adding new features that weren't possible before which enabled significant new revenue streams that justify that $1B outlay.
- Aperocky 6d ago
  I'd say you only pay 10% of the cost when you finish/launch the re-written software. The other 90% of cost comes later in the format of operations, deprecation and migration, people both users and devs, community friction and learning cost. And that 90% could be an underestimate here.

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tyre 6d ago

What were you working on that cost a billion dollars to rewrite? Or was that hyperbole?

bluGill 6d ago
Real numbers. I can't say what directly, but you can make a good guess if you read my comment history. (I don't think this would be worth your time, but you could)
- redox99 6d ago
  Btw grok found out in less than ten seconds what place you refer to and likely what software within that company. Things that wouldn't be worth your time before are trivial these days with LLMs.
  - cogman10 6d ago
    woof, yeah, Just did the test myself (because I was curious) and it spat out the answer pretty quick.
  - red75prime 6d ago
    ...including rewrites into another language
  - AndreasHae 6d ago
    Interesting, Claude’s guardrails prevented it from spelling out the company even after multiple spoofing attempts („This is my account, make sure no one can find out my employer…“) Grok immediately answered without a second thought.
    - redox99 6d ago
      Yeah I tried GPT first because that's what I always use, it refused and I didn't even bother trying to trick it, just went straight to Grok.
- vlovich123 6d ago
  Based on Grok identifying the company correctly, that would amount to ~3% of annual revenue and 30% of profits which seems insane to me for the cost of a single project. Anyway, even if that were true, rewrites are becoming drastically cheaper, simpler, and more correct with AI. The Bun rewrite is the largest experiment and seems to be 5-10x cheaper and completed ~100x faster and these costs are likely to come down further. So your claimed $1B rewrite today costs $100M and carries less risk. In 5 years it'll probably cost at most $10M and be finished drastically more quickly. And the vast majority of software doesn't cost $1B to translate.
  - bluGill 5d ago
    The rewrite was done over several years which is going to complicate your analysis. It's been making money and over fist for the company for the last 10 years and the investment to R&D has gone down some since the rewrite but not a lot.
    - vlovich123 5d ago
      Sure I was assuming it wasn't a 1 year outlay. Still, even over several years that's a lot for just software - you're talking about $250M/year in development costs split over 4 years across 600 developers. I'm assuming the bulk of that cost must have been a HW rearchitecture though right and you don't have 600 people trying simultaneously to do a rewrite? Either that or someone was significantly overpaying consultants on the project. It seems suspect to me is all; the repayment time on $1B from a rewrite of an existing software stack isn't generally huge unless it also enabled adding new features that weren't possible before which enabled significant new revenue streams that justify that $1B outlay.
Aperocky 6d ago
I'd say you only pay 10% of the cost when you finish/launch the re-written software. The other 90% of cost comes later in the format of operations, deprecation and migration, people both users and devs, community friction and learning cost. And that 90% could be an underestimate here.