Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase
www.theregister.com
: Plans move to Rust, with help from AI
  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
    121·
    6 hours ago

    The rust part, if done well, would be a good step.

    Then again, coding in rust is pain, and given how young it is AI is unlikely to manage well with it, and there isn’t the technical ability in rust present to fix what breaks.

    • addie@feddit.uk
      101·
      5 hours ago

      Indeed.

      In some ways, this kind of thing is ideal for Rust. It’s at it best when you’ve a good idea of what your data looks like, and you know where it’s coming from and going to, and what you really want is a clean implementation that you know has no mistakes. Reimplementing ‘core code’ that hasn’t changed much in twenty years to get rid of any foolish overflows or use-after-free bugs is perfect for it.

      Using Rust for exploratory coding, or when the requirements keep changing? I think you’ve picked the wrong tool for the job. Invalidate a major assumption and have to rewrite the whole damn thing. And like you say; an important choice for big projects as choosing a tool that a lot of people will be able to use. And Window is very big.

      They’re smoking crack, anyway. A million lines per dev per month? When I’m doing major refactoring, a couple thousand lines per week in the same language, mostly moving existing stuff into a new home, is a substantial change. Three orders of magnitude more with a major language conversion? Get out of here.

    • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      5 hours ago

      I mean, Rust has the massive upsite that it won’t compile in many cases if you fuck things up. Then again, embedded or generally low-level driver-y stuff is still in its infancy in Rust. Relative to C/C++ that is.

      There is stuff that you need that has no official Rust support. There is poor documentation and half baked frameworks. There are examples being silently outdated, breaking changes between framework versions, and nighlty-versions from Github mixed in to fix them. And then of course plenty of timing and hardware dependent things you will need to do yourself.

      I do this for a living and personally tried to use AI here and there to help me out, but oftentimes it fails miserably. Not always, but very often.

      • MashedTech@lemmy.world
        5·
        4 hours ago

        Rust helps you resolve memory bugs. Not logic bugs. Yeah, it’s going to be new memory safe code… But it won’t be bugfree code.

  • elgordino@fedia.io
    21·
    10 hours ago

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

    What could possibly go wrong

  • Avicenna@programming.dev
    5·
    8 hours 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.