this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030 (www.theregister.com)
submitted 3 days ago by hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] tonytins@pawb.social 77 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Plans move to Rust, with help from AI

As if AI could handle the mountains of checks Rust has you account for.

[–] a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 49 points 3 days ago

AI: This is unsafe. This is also unsafe. This third one? Unsafe.

[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm my experience, LLMs are especially bad at Rust. They really don't seem to grasp the borrow checker.

[–] sudoer777@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I used Rust with Deepseek for a small project for copying and pasting snippets and it went pretty well, but I wouldn't trust it to work with and debug a codebase on its own, especially not an OS

[–] tal@lemmy.today 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

While I agree that I don't think that an LLM is going to do the heavy lifting of making full use of Rust's type system, I assume that Rust has some way of overriding type-induced checks. If your goal is just to get to a mechanically-equivalent-to-C++ Rust version, rather than making full use of its type system to try to make the code as correct as possible, you could maybe do that. It could provide the benefit of a starting place to start using the type system to do additional checks.

[–] darvit@lemmy.darvit.nl 26 points 3 days ago 
unsafe {
   <the whole codebase>
}
[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The safety designed into Rust is suddenly foreign to the C family that I'm honestly not sure you can do that. Even "unsafe" Rust doesn't completely switch off the enforced safety

[–] InnerScientist@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Yeah, to quote the manual:

"[Unsafe Rust allows you to]

  • Dereference a raw pointer.
  • Call an unsafe function or method.
  • Access or modify a mutable static variable.
  • Implement an unsafe trait.
  • Access fields of unions.

[...] The unsafe keyword only gives you access to these five features that are then not checked by the compiler for memory safety."

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch20-01-unsafe-rust.html

[–] Miaou@jlai.lu 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

If they rely on UB at all, then this won't work. At best you get a compile time error, but more likely your rust program will do weird stuff with memory. And given how much people rely on compilers "acting nice" when it comes to aliasing (something rust does not fuck around with), I wouldn't hold my breathe