Microsoft Says It's Not Planning To Use AI To Rewrite Windows From C To Rust

Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company's goal was to 'eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.'

Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for several large-scale research projects at Microsoft, made the claim in what was originally a hiring post for his team. His original wording described a 'North Star' of '1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code' and outlined a strategy to 'combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases.' The repeated use of 'our' in the post led many to interpret it as an official company direction rather than a personal research ambition.

Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft's head of communications, told Windows Latest that the company has no such plans. Hunt subsequently edited his LinkedIn post to clarify that 'Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI' and that his team's work is a research project focused on building technology to enable language-to-language migration. He characterized the reaction as 'speculative reading between the lines.'

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