The (more or less) demise of XBox hardware can be attributed to incompetence of the XBOx leader board over many years, in particular THAT one guy (you know who I mean), or just bad luck if you want to stay polite.

Now enter .....  "Microsoft Distinguished Engineer" Galen Hunt:

Microsoft is taking an impressive step in modernizing its biggest codebases and will eliminate all C/C++ code by the end of the decade, replacing it with Rust.

“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’ To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding.”

Lots of PR gibberish, but in plain English: "We have an interpreter that can translate C source code into Rust source code. We hope our AI oone day will understand what the code actually does because we engineers no longer can."

What could possibly go wrong?

The result will be pretty obvious. Take millions of old C/C++ code lines which no human understands anyways after 40+ years of continuously adding spaghetti code. The C language is already dangerous as far as side effects are concerened, and Rust is even worse. So the geniuses at MS think "let AI decide what the code is supposed to do". 

Digging a nice bunker in the ground. I have every console worth owning and most carts/discs. Anyone is invited so long as you don't peek while playing split-screen and don't kill/eat/rape human beings. Pizza is free as long as stock lasts. Drinks are furnished. Oh, and no grease on the controllers. That's just gross.

Lol at first I thought you were quoting an SNL skit. This is actually serious?!

It was serious for a day or so.
Meanwhile, Hunt has ruddered back as hard as he can (/was ordered?)
"My team's project is a research project. We are building tech to make migration from language to language possible. Yadda yadda yadda.."

(It's still a simple interpreter - something that people have made for decades. You don't need a research project for an interpreter, you just write one iteratively until it works. I still think the end goal is exactly what he issued first).

What is the point?

Isn't performance differnces between the two basically a wash? So why bother doing such a huge task?
Having A.I do the leg work,.... what could possibly go wrong?


"We have an interpreter that can translate C source code into Rust source code.
We hope our AI oone day will understand what the code actually does because we engineers no longer can."

^ that is legit scary.
Are you saying there is stuff in windows, no one knows what does? that is just kept around for no reason other than "we don't know" ?

Honestly stuff like this is, making linux sound better by the day.
on top of all the A.I bullcrap they are pushing on us as well.

It's not just about speed.
And let's be honest, Microsoft hasn't really given a crap about speed for a long time.

It's about safety and reliability.
...Or rather Rust offers guaranteed memory safety via compile-time checks... Rust is also better when it comes to compile error checking... Anyone who has had to deal with C++ sometimes cryptic errors will know what I mean.


But... C/C++ which I avidly dabble in, is an extremely mature language with lots of support and libraries available.

Linux has always been that "maybe" alternative to Windows... But it's Achilles heel was always backwards compatibility with Windows games and software, which is now becoming pretty irrelevant, it still needs work on the GPU driver side of the equation though.

Windows 11 has over 70~ million lines of code, no single person at Microsoft would know what every single part of Windows or line of code is for... It's simply unrealistic and not how a monolithic OS is designed.
Rather Windows is broken down into "components" where specialized teams focus and build for... You would have a team for the Kernel, driver stacks, User Interface, Networking Stack, Security Stack and so on... And then another team tries to bring it all together with an end goal and vision.

And Microsoft isn't alone in this type of OS development.

Even things like nVidia Drivers and AMD Radeon Drivers have more lines of code than the NT Kernel and as such; have multiple teams developing for them as well.