{"id":369017,"date":"2025-12-24T14:43:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T14:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/369017\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T14:43:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T14:43:09","slug":"microsoft-building-team-to-eliminate-c-and-c-translate-code-to-rust-using-ai-as-windows-11-adopts-rust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/369017\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft building team to eliminate C and C++, translate code to Rust using AI, as Windows 11 adopts Rust"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Windows<\/a><\/p>\n

Microsoft is building a team dedicated to eliminating \u201cevery line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,\u201d which might touch Windows 11. While C powers the bulk of the Windows kernel and low-level components, including Windows APIs (Win32), C++ is used to build native Windows apps.<\/p>\n

Update: After this story got attention, Microsoft told us that it will not rewrite Windows using AI<\/a>. Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt added a clarification on LinkedIn: Windows is not being rewritten in Rust with AI. He said his team\u2019s work is a research project to build tech that makes language-to-language migration possible.<\/p>\n

Original story below:<\/p>\n

Microsoft\u2019s love for Rust is not exactly newfound, and nobody really hates Rust for all good reasons. Rust is a programming language (not to be confused with a framework like WebView2), and it\u2019s far more secure than C, which powers most of the native code in Windows, including its kernel.<\/p>\n

In a job listing<\/a>, Galen Hunt, who has been with Microsoft for the past three decades and is currently a Distinguished Engineer, confirmed that his team has an opening for an \u201cIC5 Principal Software Engineer.\u201d But it\u2019s far from a simple job listing. Windows Latest spotted some intriguing details on Microsoft\u2019s careers and LinkedIn post.<\/p>\n

In one of the LinkedIn posts, the company\u2019s top-level engineer says:<\/p>\n

\u201c[Our] 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\u2019s largest codebases.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of that might sound delusional if you realize Windows is primarily written in C and C++, but Microsoft insists everything is possible when an engineer can use AI to write more than a million lines of code every month.<\/p>\n

\u201c1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code\u201d.<\/p>\n

A single engineer and one million lines of code every month, and you\u2019ll have \u201cC and C++\u201d eliminated from Microsoft. Microsoft is actively hiring such developers who would join the company\u2019s \u201celiminate C and C++ by 2030\u201d plan as an IC5 Principal Software Engineer.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur North Star is \u201c1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,\u201d Microsoft\u2019s Galen Hunt wrote in a LinkedIn post<\/a> spotted by Windows Latest.<\/p>\n

\"Microsoft<\/p>\n

This statement follows a similar remark by Microsoft\u2019s Satya Nadella, who previously said<\/a> that up to 30% of the company\u2019s code was written by AI, and that this likely includes Windows as well.<\/p>\n

Microsoft says it\u2019ll deploy AI to \u201cmodify\u201d C and C++ code\u201d at a large scale and achieve the target by 2030 (hopefully)<\/p>\n

Microsoft has built a powerful \u201ccode processing infrastructure,\u201d which likely means the company trained its AI model on C and C++ code alongside Rust. This infrastructure uses \u201cAI Agents to make code modifications at scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft is confident that its infrastructure will enable the company to evolve and translate most of the company\u2019s largest C and C++ systems to Rust.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur team is part of the Future of Scalable Software Engineering group in the EngHorizons organization in Microsoft CoreAI,\u201d a Microsoft engineer explained.<\/p>\n

Rust is more secure than C and C++, and likely a better choice, but can we trust AI agents to \u201ctranslate\u201d the codebase?<\/p>\n

\"Windows<\/p>\n

I love Rust, and rewriting parts of Windows in Rust is not a bad idea. Rust itself sounds like a better alternative than C and C++, largely due to proven security improvements, but our concern is with the AI-driven approach, not Rust.<\/p>\n

AI should be able to translate the syntax, but it might fail at the intent of the code, and that likely explains why we\u2019ve had Windows updates breaking basic features like Task Manager<\/a> or even causing the BitLocker recovery screen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rust is part of Microsoft\u2019s efforts to make Windows more secure, while WebView2 takes care of the frontend<\/p>\n

Microsoft has been advocating for Rust over C and C++ for nearly six years, but at that point, we had no clue that the company actually planned to dump C and C++ as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat separates Rust from C and C++ is its strong safety guarantees,\u201d Microsoft argues in a blog post<\/a> from 2019. \u201cUnless explicitly opted-out of through usage of the \u201cunsafe\u201d keyword, Rust is completely memory safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft recently made Windows APIs ready for Rust developers. There\u2019s also a repo on GitHub<\/a> called \u201cwindows-rs,\u201d which is a Rust projection (bindings + glue) of the Windows API, so Rust code can call Win32, COM, and WinRT the same way C++ or C# would.<\/p>\n

Microsoft also has a separate effort for Rust driver development (windows-drivers-rs on GitHub<\/a>), which shows the company is exploring Rust beyond apps, too. And it turns out this whole \u201coptimize for Rust\u201d was not a one-off project or fancy \u201copen-source\u201d work, as the company is really serious about Rust.<\/p>\n

So far, Microsoft\u2019s attempt to replace native languages like C++, WinUI, XAML, etc, hasn\u2019t gone well with consumers or even enterprises. In fact, Microsoft has contributed to the\u00a0broader problem, where the most\u00a0popular Windows apps are RAM-consuming monsters<\/a>, such as Discord or the company\u2019s own Teams.<\/p>\n

Windows UI is gradually shifting to web-based components. It\u2019s not just about apps, as we have React within the Start menu. Moreover, we\u2019re now getting WebView2 inside the Notifications Center for the Calendar\u2019s Agenda view. This means a new Edge\/WebView2 instance is triggered when you open the Notifications Center.<\/p>\n

Only time will tell how well these \u201cagentic\u201d programmers will translate C and C++ code to Rust or other languages across Windows and other Microsoft products.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft is building a team dedicated to eliminating \u201cevery line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-369017","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}