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Those interested in this may find the following articles of interest: Microsoft goals [edit: err, Microsoft hiring manager vision-casting goal ] to convert 1 b
by gregw2 6d ago
Those interested in this may find the following articles of interest:
Microsoft goals [edit: err, Microsoft hiring manager vision-casting goal ] to convert 1 billion lines of code to rust by 2030 via automated tooling enabling "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code":
https://thenewstack.io/microsofts-bold-goal-replace-1b-lines-of-c-c-with-rust/ https://thenewstack.io/microsofts-bold-goal-replace-1b-lines...
DARPA work towards automating converting C code to Rust using a mix of 6 different teams using different approaches:
https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to-rust https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to...
Feb 2026 Progress report:
https://github.com/DARPA-TRACTOR-Program/Reports/blob/main/First_TRACTOR_Evaluation_Report.pdf https://github.com/DARPA-TRACTOR-Program/Reports/blob/main/F...
- burakemir 6d agoIt would be possible for me to give a more nuanced take, but the upshot is: none of that shit is going to work 100%. One may get local maxima like an unsafe bonanza, or something that introduces a custom runtime memory management discipline at the cost of performance etc. Fully equivalent C++ to Rust in full generality is mainly wishful thinking. Of course that does not mean one should not try it. See also my other comment.
- gregw2 6d agoOh, I 100% agree. The question is how much you can reduce the effort of the port/migration, and in particular the validation effort. I've worked on projects where the core bits of code were "90%" converted by some automated tool, and in my view the overall benefit to the project timeline was probably only 20-30% because of the Amdahl's-law-type overheads of validation and bits of code not supported by the automation/conversion process. Nice, but no silver bullet. Non-idiomatic porting also isn't super-helpful if the resulting code isn't maintainable.
- mkehrt 6d agoAs I pointed out in a sibling comment, the plan isn't for it to work. This is a job posting for a researcher at MSR to investigate what it might look like someday.
- jodrellblank 6d agoThat is not "Microsoft goals", that is "one employee's LinkedIn comment of his personal goal".
- mkehrt 6d agoIt's less one guy's plan and more one Microsoft Research team's research goal to investigate technologies that might enable that in a few years. So probably more institutional support than just some guy, but less actually planning on succeeding in the full ambitious goal.
- afdbcreid 6d agoNo, after this made some waves he or some other senior (I don't remember exactly) reported that this is not an official plan.
- mkehrt 6d agoSorry, by "official support" I mean that there is support within MSR to investigate these tools as a research project, no that there is a plan to actually do the conversion.
- andsoitis 6d agowhat's your point?
- jodrellblank 5d agoWhy are you saying that you love Hitler[1]? (that isn't what you said? what's your point?) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
- eterm 6d agoThere have also been repeated statements from NSA & CISA that they recommend all development should be done in memory safe languages. It's abundantly clear that there is a strong headwind towards memory safety, whether that's Rust or GC'd languages.
- estebank 6d agoA headwind makes it harder to advance in the direction you're going. I think you might have meant to say "there is a strong tailwind towards memory safety".
- eterm 6d agoYou're right, I better do a 360 on my comment ;)
- foolswisdom 6d agoA 180 might be more useful :)
- andsoitis 6d agooh boy, maybe geometry intuitions and spatial reasoning are what's really needed.
- blub 6d agoThese kinds of sanitized corporate, feel-good articles are anything but interesting. A disgruntled former Azure employee posting what a clusterfuck their SW, including their Rust effort is? That’s both rare and interesting.
- mokre 6d agoWhat with this llms not so good in rust mantra? Something changed? In my experience they are pretty good, but haters gonna hate.
- Tanjreeve 6d agoMost people it's good at syntax and the error messages give you a good loop. But the domains rust actually makes sense in tend to be quite punishing on slop both culturally and technically.
- dgroshev 6d agoTo add to this, I find that the delta between the amount of code and pain you get with good and bad abstractions is substantially higher in rust than other languages. It's alright to muddle through in Python or TS, but with Rust bad abstractions are punishing. LLMs are pretty bad at picking abstractions.
- eru 6d agoIt's good that it's punishing when the abstraction are bad: then you notice. With Python or TS, as you say, you get less feedback.
- dgroshev 6d agoThat's true, although inconvenient for production code that needs to be delivered yesterday. Sadly, agents don't mind generating gigatons of code instead of refactoring the abstractions.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- JoshTriplett 6d agoLLMs are unusually good at Rust; it's an optimization target. And the constraints provided by "successfully compile with the Rust compiler" make it work well for agent iteration. (I have mixed feelings about that, but empirically it holds true.)
- amir734jj 6d agoThere is no way they can re-write everything in Rust by 2030. No way. Even new projects are modern C++ at MSFT. Some teams are creating their Rust/C++ binding but that's a very small fraction.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- germandiago 6d agoJust in case slop is not strong enough.