Microsoft has announced its intention to translate the code of its products to the Rust language by 2030. The task will primarily be carried out by artificial intelligence agents, but the company will also hire new engineers to work on the project.
The plans of the software giant were announced by the company's lead engineer Galen Hunt — he added that a vacancy for a lead software engineer has opened, who will be tasked with working on the tools that Microsoft is preparing to achieve this goal.
"The goal of this <..> position is to help us develop and expand our infrastructure to facilitate the translation of Microsoft’s largest systems from C and C++ to Rust. <..> We have built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure will create scalable graphs that will encompass the source code on a large scale. Furthermore, our AI processing infrastructure will help us connect AI-driven agents to make changes to the code on a large scale," Mr. Hunt explained.
Rust differs from C and C++ in that it is safe for memory operations, helps avoid out-of-bounds read and write operations, as well as errors related to using memory after it has been freed — such errors often turn into vulnerabilities in software.
In recent years, even government authorities have urged developers to switch to memory-safe languages, including Rust. Microsoft is also striving to expand the application of Rust — in 2022, the Chief Technology Officer of the Azure cloud platform named it the default language for new projects; the company's researchers have also been working on a tool to automatically convert code fragments from C to Rust.
Given the vast number of software products at Microsoft, the volume of the codebase means that it will have to undertake a colossal amount of work to translate it to another language. Even with AI agents and the software giant's powerful resources, completing this task by 2030 will not be easy.
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