Microsoft is not rewriting Windows in Rust

A job posting by a Microsoft engineer sparked excitement about a project “to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030”, replacing it with Rust — but alas for fans of the memory-safe programming language, it turns out this is a personal goal, not a corporate one, and Rust isn’t necessarily even the final target.

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt posted about his ambitious goal on LinkedIn four days ago, provoking a wave of excitement and concern.

Now he’s been forced to clarify: “My team’s project is a research project. We are building tech to make migration from language to language possible,” he wrote in an update to his LinkedIn post. His intent, he said, was to find like-minded engineers, “not to set a new strategy for Windows 11+ or to imply that Rust is an endpoint.”

Hunt’s project is to investigate how AI can be used to assist in the translation of code from one language to another at scale. “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code’,” he wrote.

He’s recruiting an engineer to help build the infrastructure to do that, demonstrating the technology using Rust as the target language and C and C++ as the source.

The successful candidate will join the Future of Scalable Software Engineering team in Microsoft’s CoreAI group, building static analysis and machine learning tools for AI-assisted translation and migration.

Pressure to ditch C and C++ in favor of memory-safe languages such as Rust comes right from the top, with research by Google and Microsoft showing that around 70 percent of all security vulnerabilities in software are caused by memory safety issues.

However, using AI to rewrite code, even in a memory-safe language, may not make things more secure: AI-generated code typically contains more issues than code written by humans, according to research by CodeRabbit.

That’s not stopping some of the biggest software developers pushing ahead with AI-powered software development, though. Already, AI writes 30% of Microsoft’s new code, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in April.