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Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI
- woozyolliew 10mo agoPart of me wonders if this whole post was sarcasm/irony. A frustrated engineer’s projection of what upper management wants engineers to believe?
- echo7394 10mo ago[flagged]
- marcodiego 10mo agoThe simple fact that they have to deny it, meaning such an absurd is widely considered plausible, is already a sign of their reputation.
- fragmede 10mo agoToo 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.
- dralley 10mo agoNah. It's only a sign that people read way too much into random speculative Linkedin posts.
- j-o-m 10mo agoI 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 10mo agoMicrosoft 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.
- j-o-m 10mo agoThat 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.
- EPWN3D 10mo agoHe 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.
- Spooky23 10mo agoHave 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 10mo agoThe testing thing happened like, 10 years ago at this point.
- Spooky23 10mo agoYeah, Windows 10/11 really suck in terms of quality. New/old Outlook is like a house with random rooms added by people who don’t talk to each other.
- 1gn15 10mo agoGee whiz, what an interesting way of thinking. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
- rsynnott 10mo agoI mean, there was a time when what ultimately became Windows Vista was going to have a largely .net userspace. They also had a project to produce a .net _kernel_. Microsoft doing some weird thing that obviously won’t work out isn’t _that_ hard to believe.
- Tempest1981 10mo 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 10mo agoMy 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 10mo agothey probably would using AI to review the code also, like cmon this is MS we talking about
- preommr 10mo agoThat 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.
- __patchbit__ 10mo agoIt 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.
- sva_ 10mo agoThe 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.
- charcircuit 10mo 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.
- monocasa 10mo agoMy 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.
- charcircuit 10mo agoWith 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 10mo agoThere's a nearly incalculable difference between bumping a compiler version and rewriting it in a different language.
- charcircuit 10mo agoA C++ compiler translates C++ to an assembly. This project would translate C++ to another language. It's not that different of a concept.
- Sytten 10mo agoI 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.
- checker659 10mo agoWhat makes it inevitable?
- hatefulheart 10mo agoGood 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.
- isodev 10mo agoHey let’s not put the Rust fanatics in the same bucket as the LLM bros. One is a safe programming language, the other is an overgrown lorem ipsum text generator. We’re not the same :)
- Sytten 10mo agoI 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/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/
- troglo-byte 10mo agoI 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.
- kyleee 10mo agoJust say what you mean
- IshKebab 10mo agoI think he's saying that Rust is written by Elon Musk? Who knows.
- avadodin 10mo agoI 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.
- jollymonATX 10mo agoThat it got to this point is hilarious
- seam_carver 10mo agoSo Windows 12 is
- PedroBatista 10mo agoThis 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 10mo agoXbox 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 10mo agoThis IBM? https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-build-monster-10-000-qubit-quantum-computer-by-2029-after-solving-science-behind-fault-tolerance https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-bu... (Check attached papers)
- treadmill 10mo agoTalk is cheap. Remind me of this, if/when the "will build" has changed to "has built".
- esseph 10mo agoIf you are at JPMorgan or aerospace today using quantum computing, there is a very good chance you are using an IBM Heron 156 qubit scalable computer. They have been pushing quantum computers into very large companies for quite awhile now. Google is strictly in research mode, but doing a lot of good, hard work.
- zomiaen 10mo agoWill the AI let me make my taskbar vertical again?
- saghm 10mo agoFrom 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 10mo agoMy 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.
- saghm 10mo agoThey also used the first person in describing the position they were hiring for > I have an open position in my team for a IC5 Principal Engineer. The position in in-person in Redmond Reading between the lines is what's needed to differentiate that from the immediately following sentences that are also in the first person. I don't think it's remotely as obvious as you're saying that everyone should be able to tell that wasn't the explicit goal the company had given him for the team.
- cryptonector 10mo ago
- sclai39 10mo agoan idiotic milestone and goal if you ask me, an non sensible ambition inflated ego that will be their downfall