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Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

66 pointsposted 14 hours ago

89 Comments

sva_

13 hours ago

The original LinkedIn post is pretty wild. I wonder if he did a fat line of coke before writing that, or if it actually were any concrete plans that have been worked out.

cryptonector

35 minutes ago

| My goal ...

later

| ... our ...

I think Galen's goal to rewrite every bit of C/C++ was his goal, not Microsoft's.

hrdwdmrbl

12 hours ago

As a goal for 2030, it doesn’t seem that wild. Shoot for the moon

monocasa

12 hours ago

Rewriting Microsoft's 10s if not 100s of millions of lines of native code in four years doesn't sound that wild to you?

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

bodash

7 hours ago

Windows’ downfall will finally give rise to the Linux desktops, already seeing trends in how popular Omarchy is and well received

xvector

12 hours ago

Just toss an agent at it (tm)

arvigeus

11 hours ago

“Make no mistakes” and it’s a few days of work…

koakuma-chan

12 hours ago

No? They will harness the power of AGI agents to rewrite everything in Rust. Sounds good to me.

ronsor

12 hours ago

> AGI

That thing we don't have yet?

koakuma-chan

12 hours ago

No, we have that. The thing we don't have is ASI.

mcv

6 hours ago

The guy who can't raise a kid without AI? I wouldn't trust his opinion on things like this.

zeristor

9 hours ago

Maybe he looked it up on his AI

monocasa

11 hours ago

One of the least fun things about a hype bubble is that I legitimately can't tell when people are joking anymore.

koakuma-chan

10 hours ago

You should have been able to tell it's sarcasm because I said "harness the power." This phrase is only used in conjunction with bullshit.

monocasa

18 minutes ago

I agree it's mostly only used in conjunction with bullshit, but during a hype bubble a lot of the users of that phrase don't fully realize they're spouting bullshit, and it's used in earnest.

It’s still wild because it’s mostly useless. Rewriting a few core components might improve security a bit, but otherwise it’ll not change anything for end users. This is the typical attractive but useless project for bored programmer with no product or business vision.

charcircuit

12 hours ago

>is pretty wild

How is it wild? On social media I kept seeing things like people falsely expecting the end goal would require manually reading through a million lines of code. It seemed more like people making up reasons to be mad or trying to dunk on the author.

overgard

12 hours ago

LLMs generate lots of security issues and bugs. Just being "Rust" doesn't automatically fix that. Generating that amount of code means no human review. How could this not end in obvious disaster?

bdangubic

12 hours ago

humans generate a lot more security issues and a lot more bugs, how could humans coding not end in obvious disaster…

Bridged7756

3 hours ago

So AI is based on the insecure and buggy human code, but on top of that it can't think for itself? Definitely, in 2025.... 2027 it will be, coding, for us all.

112233

4 hours ago

Do you have a study we can read and evaluate validity of it's methods?

If not, here, I can show you my opinion too!: No, what you said is completely false.

bdangubic

2 hours ago

do you have a study we can read and evaluate validity of methods of millions of SWEs that write code? if not…?

Arainach

12 hours ago

If you're "producing" a million lines of code (that's 50K lines per working day) and not reading them, that's even worse.

monocasa

12 hours ago

My read was rewriting one million lines of code per engineer month using ML to do the heavy lifting.

Which is absolutely batshit. There's no way that can be reviewed properly, even if it's putting all of the review work on all of the other teams.

dchftcs

12 hours ago

At some point velocity will slow down too. Figuring out edge cases in production to add or subtract a few lines, or backtracking from a bad change.

gorgoiler

12 hours ago

You’re right about the impossibility of reviewing for style, clarity, and coherence. For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.

As a third-party developer in the late 2000s I remember my boss giving me a CDROM binder (binders?) of every single OS release that Microsoft had ever put out. I assume he’d been given it my his developer-relations rep at Microsoft. My team and I used it to ensure our code worked on every MSDOS/Win* platform we cared to target.

I expect that, internally, the Windows team have crazy amounts of resources to implement the most comprehensive regression testing suite ever created. To that extent, at least, you’d be able to tell if the Rust version did what the old code did even if you didn’t read the code itself.

monocasa

11 hours ago

> For correctness though, Windows is famous for being insistent on backwards compatibility over timespans measured in decades and that must surely be automated to the hilt.

That hasn't been nearly the same goal for decades now.

For instance, Crysis literally won't run on win10 or later anymore.

On top of that, security bugs aren't the kind of thing you can automate away during a rewrite that no one has the bandwidth to actually review.

dmitrygr

12 hours ago

What makes you think any existing recent code added to Windows has been reviewed by anyone? This is the company that broke the start menu and the login screen in two consecutive updates.

monocasa

12 hours ago

I've heard some inside stories from microsofties.

They do still review code, but the first wave of layoffs in 2022 mainly hit principal engineers and above because some bean counters said "oh, these are the engineers that are costing us the most per head", so it's kind of the inmates running the asylum now.

And I'll say that their biggest sin was always that their code from the late 90s on was about 20% too clever for their own good. Kind of goes to that classic quip about how how it takes twice your brain power to debug code as it takes to write it, so if you were already maxing out just writing it, then you're not smart enough to debug it. That's half of why features seemed to get a 1.0 release, then get replaced with something rather than iteratively improved (the other half being FAANG style internal incentive structures).

Were all seeing the effects of them clearing house of their weaponized autism that was barely keeping the wheels on the wagon. They do review, but they don't have the ability to do it properly at scale anymore. Which makes rewriting everything even more batshit.

stackghost

12 hours ago

Also the company whose start menu ads made the interface so laggy their "solution" was to just preload the bloat.

charcircuit

12 hours ago

With this mindset I feel like you would also think bumping a C++ compiler toolchain version is impossible due to all the different changes to code generation that could happen. This is already done today and has similar issues where technically all the code can be affected, but it's not reviewed via a process of manually reading every line.

monocasa

12 hours ago

There's a nearly incalculable difference between bumping a compiler version and rewriting it in a different language.

charcircuit

12 hours ago

A C++ compiler translates C++ to an assembly. This project would translate C++ to another language. It's not that different of a concept.

dagmx

12 hours ago

It’s significantly more straight forward to go from a higher level to a lower level representation than it is to go between different high level representations.

That’s not to trivialize what a compiler does, but it’s effectively going from a complex form to its building blocks while maintaining semantics.

Changing high level languages introduces fundamentally different semantics. Both can decompose to the same general building blocks, but you can’t necessarily compose them the same way.

At the simplest example, a compiler backend (the part you’re describing) can’t reason about data access rules. That is the domain of the language’s compiler frontend and a fundamental difference between C++ and Rust that can’t just be directly derived.

monocasa

12 hours ago

A compiler isn't using a statistical model of language more complex than anyone could understand with a lifetime of study to do its translation, adheres to a standard for that translation, and if you're important enough (and Microsoft internal teams are for MSVC), you get heads up on what specifically is changing so you know where to look for issues.

This is "lets put our postgres database on blockchain because I think blockchain is cool" level of crap you see in peak bubble.

overgard

12 hours ago

Compilers are deterministic.

Krssst

12 hours ago

There is a C++ standard that everyone writing C++ code follows and newer version are usually compatible with one another regardless of toolchain version. Behavior of the toolchain should not change. Worst case you can use deterministic, reliable tools to automatically detect problematic locations if there really is a behavior change. (compiler warnings/errors for example)

AI code generation is not deterministic and has no guarantee of behavior, thus requires review unless incorrect code is acceptable.

charcircuit

12 hours ago

>AI code generation is not deterministic

You don't have to use AI code generation to be what is generating the code or you could require some kind of proof of equivalence to verify the code that was generated.

saghm

12 hours ago

From the initial post:

> My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases

From his follow-up:

> It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended… with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.. Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.

So either he doesn't think that Windows is written in C/C++, it's not "from Microsoft", or he doesn't know what "reading between the lines" means, because those literally are the words he said. Sure, he also said "and algorithms", but I'd argue that inferring that to be a significant difference would require a lot more reading between the lines.

I guess he could also quibble that "eliminating every line of C and C++ from Microsoft" was supposed to mean new lines of code being written rather than existing ones, but that's both not the way most people would read it (if I said I wanted to eliminate all water from the planet, most people wouldn't think I meant I was eliminating rain but leaving the oceans alone) and a bit dubious from a technical perspective (since leaving the existing Windows codebase intact would make it pretty hard not to at least occasionally need to write a new line of code in the existing language).

cryptonector

33 minutes ago

My goal is for every line of C/C++ to be rewritten.

My goal. Not Microsoft's or SpaceX's or...

When Galen says "my goal is ..." I take that at face value but as aspirational.

marcodiego

13 hours ago

The simple fact that they have to deny it, meaning such an absurd is widely considered plausible, is already a sign of their reputation.

Spooky23

12 hours ago

Have you used Microsoft software lately? After they fired the testing people a few years ago, the number of regressions I find at work is nuts.

hawaiianbrah

11 hours ago

The testing thing happened like, 10 years ago at this point.

dralley

12 hours ago

Nah. It's only a sign that people read way too much into random speculative Linkedin posts.

j-o-m

12 hours ago

I don’t understand this view point. How is anyone reading ‘way too much’ into the post based on what’s being discussed in this thread. A senior engineer leading a team at Microsoft saying that his goal is to rewrite/replace all C and C++ code with Rust using AI to facilitate the work is plainly saying what the comments in this thread are reacting to. No onenis reading into the statement, just plain reading. And even though it’s been edited since attention got focused on it, the post still says a goal for his team is 1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.

Further, this is not a random speculative post, it is an announcement for a job opening on the posters team.

dralley

12 hours ago

Microsoft has thousands of senior engineers and one of them engaging in this project and perhaps hiring a small handful of people does not equate to a large company-wide planned mandate.

EPWN3D

2 hours ago

He is not a senior engineer; he's a distinguished engineer. His pay package is comparable to a director's or VP's, so no he's not just one of thousands of senior engineers.

j-o-m

11 hours ago

That is true, there is a lot of emphasis being placed on his post as though it were the embodiment of Microsoft’s goals and policies going forward. I was a little surprised that he is just a lead on a research team from the bombastic tone of the post.

I’ll own up to not considering that when I wrote my comment, still think discussing Microsoft’s seemingly head first dive into massive AI generation of code is entertaining, even if it is not really as important (or important at all) as it would be if this was a post from the CEO.

1gn15

12 hours ago

Gee whiz, what an interesting way of thinking. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

fragmede

12 hours ago

Too bad they aren't Google and announced in on April fool's and get to claim that it was just a joke if it turns out it didn't land well.

troglo-byte

12 hours ago

I think I would be more interested in Rust the language if Rust the PR sphere was not suggestive of certain all-powerful online influences that I've developed antibodies against. I'm not claiming that they're the same people that dig tunnels and launch satellites, just that my immune system is getting activated as if they were.

avadodin

8 hours ago

I thought I knew where this comment was going but then it just kept going above and beyond.

Do not let them vax your system against computer viruses with their programming languages.

Godspeed.

kyleee

12 hours ago

Just say what you mean

Tempest1981

13 hours ago

> Our North Star is "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code"

Can someone explain this? Are they suggesting that (eventually) one engineer can produce 1 million lines of Rust code in a month? Or replace 1 million lines of C code?

Using new "powerful code processing infrastructure"... but would it understand the semantics? Are those semantics clearly documented?

monocasa

12 hours ago

My read is Rewrite it in Rust™ for the whole MS native language codebase, but with AI doing the heavy lifting of the rewrite. Except the heavy part of the rewrite would be the review process, and I would hope they aren't trusting that to predominately ML.

tonyhart7

12 hours ago

they probably would using AI to review the code also, like cmon this is MS we talking about

patchbit

10 hours ago

It is reactive exaggerative marketing sloganeering Alan Kay ridicules executives in business class for having.

A paper on seL4 mentions $350 a source line of code on a 12 year engineering hour completed program that qualifies to a quality of code behavior expected from QNX.

preommr

12 hours ago

That line doesn't even make any sense. AI usage for a project is binary (either it requires a person, or it doesn't, there's no such thing where an AI is good for a team for a team of three but not a team of two). And we can already one-shot really complex applications in seconds/minutes. Why the hell would it take an entire month to generate one million lines of code?

It really just boils down to AI writing a million lines of code.

I actually think it can probably already do something like where there's a lot of boilerplate code.

zomiaen

12 hours ago

Will the AI let me make my taskbar vertical again?

PedroBatista

12 hours ago

This whole thing is hilarious.

In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize.

In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable of making them try again and win. Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.

Now they have the Cloud, I'm not so sure the Windows division can turn this turd around this time. Xbox has tangentially been the canary.

philistine

12 hours ago

Xbox was poised to be an earthquake to the video game industry but they squandered with the execution. Hence the layoffs to quell the market.

The rest of Microsoft might go the same way. I guess now I know what it felt like looking at IBM in 1989.

esseph

10 hours ago

This IBM?

https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-bu...

(Check attached papers)

treadmill

8 hours ago

Talk is cheap. Remind me of this, if/when the "will build" has changed to "has built".

elankart

10 hours ago

Can you give some concrete examples of “cheap young” contract workers being hired to work on product features? You seem to know a lot of things so maybe some concrete examples will help.

tonyhart7

8 hours ago

its nice way to say Indians

misswaterfairy

11 hours ago

> Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.

A couple of quotes from the article above:

"WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce crashes."

"But Teams is not the only web app causing trouble when RAM prices are about to soar, as we also have WhatsApp. When WhatsApp debuted on Windows, it was an Electron app. However, Meta later upgraded it to WinUI/XAML (also known as native code on Windows), and WhatsApp eventually became one of the best apps [... using] less than 200MB of RAM and had smoother animations and faster load times."

It seems that most developers these days focus on web-exclusive technologies and try to force desktop and system level programs into this paradigm.

C, C++, and C# programmers seem to be as rare as hens teeth today?

Are colleges and universities not teaching these languages anymore? Is this a symptom of 'cloud-first' strategies where its easier to 'just use JavaScript' for everything, perhaps developer laziness/reluctance to learn another 'lower level' language?

I really don't understand the appeal of web-centric languages like JavaScript and TypeScript in the desktop and systems realm when they lack a standard library (which genuinely scares me: supply chain attacks...), likely contributing to the RAM consumption issue as developers just keep piling packages on for one specific function missing in another imported library, and aren't natively compilable to small binaries that aren't dependent on a runtime or bulky embedded interpreter.

Yes, C# technically falls afoul of this (in .NET), but C# at least has a standard library that is comprehensive and is supported by an enterprise (Microsoft, for all its faults), not random developers on the internet.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Microsoft allowing key components of Windows 11 to be rewritten in web-wrappers is only going to drive people further into Linux, as the RAM affordability crisis continues.

Bridged7756

2 hours ago

Electron apps do are resource hogs, but that's not the reason teams is crap. Neither XAML the reason the Whatsapp app is good.

Developers focus on web because that's where the money is. Who would want to go down the Desktop road when it's less money and a dying field?

Similarly, IMO for making UIs, declarative is the way to go. A lot of these UI Desktop frameworks are procedural, which is a drag to write for UIs, and also, has many times less the size and support that, say, React, does.

Another thing is that hardware is always getting better. There is no incentive to increase performance if no one complains. A vocal minority of tech guys raving about how Electron apps are resource hogs don't dictamine what's performant and what's not.

g-b-r

13 minutes ago

> A vocal minority of tech guys raving about how Electron apps are resource hogs don't dictamine what's performant and what's not.

Because only tech guys have limited ram?

reval

9 hours ago

I feel like this ‘cloud-first’ strategy will only get worse now that AI assisted development is common. I notice my personal AI assisted C# projects get far more complex than when I use some JS framework.

If it’s not the colleges and universities, you can bet the AIs are better trained on JS/TS.

esseph

10 hours ago

Because JavaScript makes a SaaS that a developer can throw up on hetzer in a weekend and become a billionaire.

That's the line that was told for 15 years.

jollymonATX

12 hours ago

That it got to this point is hilarious

woozyolliew

12 hours ago

Part of me wonders if this whole post was sarcasm/irony. A frustrated engineer’s projection of what upper management wants engineers to believe?

seam_carver

12 hours ago

So Windows 12 is

echo7394

13 hours ago

[flagged]

Sytten

12 hours ago

I am sure why people are so terminally online to care about this. Like Rust for Linux is also here to stay and we can expect that in 10-20y a large portion of the kernel will be in Rust. Obviously the post was boasting, it was meant as a recruitment ad. They actually probably got a few decent candidates from it.

lunar_mycroft

10 hours ago

Adding rust to the kernel makes sense. Porting a million lines of code per engineer month is insane, regardless of language (it works out to ~600ms per line total, including review, testing, etc). Anyone who heard about that expectation and thought it sounded good is the opposite of decent candidate.

checker659

12 hours ago

What makes it inevitable?

Sytten

10 hours ago

It has been approved as the same standing as C and assembly, it is there to stay despite what the haters say [1]. Linus is behind the push and for good reasons. Android keeps demonstrating year after year the benefits, at some point I don't know what else to say.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Linux-Kernel-Rust-Support-Offic...

checker659

10 hours ago

Just because something is beneficial does not mean it will be taken up by the community. My question is (and that is what I'm most interested in atm) what makes Rust's adoption inevitable? Are there people paying to make that happen? Are kernel level security bugs that big of a concern now that migrating to Rust is a pressing issue? Do you see what I mean?

(Again, just to clarify my comment: I'm not challenging anyone. It's just that there are hundreds of programming languages out there. Rust's been around for a good while. So, why now? And circling back to my original question, what makes its adoption inevitable?)

hatefulheart

12 hours ago

Good question, it’s not. You're responding to just another Rust and/or LLM fanatic claiming they can predict the future. Dime a dozen on this board.

Sytten

10 hours ago

I will that the Rust fanatic mantle thank you very much. Check your sources though [1]. I dont predict the future I just listen to Linus.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/