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

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    10·
    3 hours ago

    Tech bosses have well and truly lost it.

    Consider that:

    • Code is primarily to communicate from human-to-human, and only incidentally for computers to execute
    • A codebase that is 30+ years old has an absolute shitload of learnings incorporated into it, much of it very subtle
    • Languages are, in fact, different. So some things cannot be directly translated with exactly the same semantics, so devs will need to fully understand the intent and resolve ambiguities
    • A million lines per month is a lot of text for someone to successfully interpret and translate without losing any subtleties
    • SpicyLizards@reddthat.com
      6·
      3 hours ago

      And 1 million lines to truly review. Reviewers are used to their own heuristics based on common and critical mistakes to find errors. I reckon AI errors won’t follow familair patterns, making reviews even more tedious.

      • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        1 hour ago

        Yeah…

        Human mistakes tend to 1) look like mistakes, and 2) are surrounded by lots of hints that the author had trouble with that section of code.

        AI mistakes tend to 1) look like regular code, and 2) look just as confident and effort-ful as the rest of the code.

  • Avicenna@programming.dev
    6·
    3 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.

  • elgordino@fedia.io
    22·
    5 hours ago

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

    What could possibly go wrong