Microsoft engineer clarifies speculation around plans to ‘eliminate’ C, C++ languages by 2030
- Speculation arose after a LinkedIn post from a Microsoft engineer suggested the C++ replacement.
- The engineer has since clarified that this was a research project and not a Microsoft plan.
- Microsoft is preparing to make Rust its “first-class language”
In a LinkedIn post by Microsoft engineer Galen Hunt, he sparked a lot of discussion after sharing his goal to “eliminate all lines of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030” – even announcing an open position on his team to make progress towards this goal.
The purpose of the role was to “help us [Microsoft] “scale and augment our infrastructure to enable the translation of Microsoft’s largest C and C++ systems to Rust” – with Hunt explaining that a “powerful code processing infrastructure” has already been built.
However, the engineer has since updated his post to say “Just to clarify… Windows is *NOT* rewritten in Rust with AI. […] My team’s project is a research project.
A project, not a plan
According to the post, Hunt’s team’s mission is to “build capabilities that enable Microsoft and our customers to eliminate technical debt at scale,” with an AI processing infrastructure that “allows us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make changes to code at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already working at scale on problems like code understanding.”
Although the post specifies that this is just a team search, the scale of the project appears to be quite large; “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,'” says Hunt, “to accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph on the source code at scale.”
It is true, however, that Microsoft has begun a transition to the Rust programming language, spending $10 million to make it the “first-class language” for engineering systems.
This desire is reflected in Google’s commitments, with the company stating that “memory safety bugs in C and C++ continue to be the most difficult source of inaccuracy to resolve”, as Rust joined Java and Kotlin in the Android Open Source Project.
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