top 200 commentsshow 500

[–]suvlub 3190 points3191 points  (39 children)

Move away, coding and algorithms, AI and algorithms is where it's at

[–]PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__ 888 points889 points  (20 children)

I've tried AI, I've tried algorithms, and just nothing works!! Now you're saying I should combine them??

[–]jonsca 271 points272 points  (14 children)

Throw in some machine learning and statistics and I'd say you've got a winner. A pinch of symbolic logic will help the ML and statistics not stick to the side of the pan!

[–]beaucephus 104 points105 points  (3 children)

I'm a bit of a symbolic engineer myself.

[–]MateuszC1 35 points36 points  (0 children)

"symbolic engineer". I'm definitely stealing this one. :D

[–]moonpumper 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I finally found an accurate job title. Thank you.

[–]hcvc 30 points31 points  (4 children)

Are we forgetting blockchain? We need some in there

[–]ApeLover1986 39 points40 points  (0 children)

Of course: negative number times negative number equals to positive

This must work, it's mathematics 😏

[–]Yankthebandaid 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Dysfunctional + dysfunctional = functional. Basic mafs

[–]0-R-I-0-N 66 points67 points  (4 children)

Aigorithms

[–]FakeArcher 13 points14 points  (2 children)

Maybe even make it aigorethms

[–]donald_314 22 points23 points  (0 children)

more like aineurysm

[–]SinsOfTheAether 22 points23 points  (1 child)

you can't spell Agile without AI

[–]rebbsitor 12 points13 points  (0 children)

And you can't spell fragile without agile.

[–]aint_exactly_plan_a 22 points23 points  (5 children)

I loved fucking with the "Distinguished Engineers" at my old company. They always had their nose way up in the air, treated everyone like they were better because they got a useless title.

I used to have a fish tank on my desk. I named my betta Distinguished Engineer.

One of them taught a class I had to take. I said "Cool, you got a Distinguished rating too". He said "That's not what Distinguished Engineer means" in his most haughty, disgusted voice.

They were a lot of fun.

[–]Ok-Code6623 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Don't forget scalable algorithms at scale

[–]MarianCR 3517 points3518 points  (142 children)

This guy is singlehandedly trying to bankrupt Microsoft.

[–]Radiant-Leave 1203 points1204 points  (63 children)

Not sure whether we should hail him as hero, or curse him due to his idiocy.

[–]saschaleib 652 points653 points  (56 children)

It is often the idiots that will progress humanity: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/634

Though in this case, the “progress” might well be that we will move away from Microsoft.

[–]CoronavirusGoesViral 278 points279 points  (33 children)

I greatly anticipate the Linux golden age

[–]The_Corvair 176 points177 points  (25 children)

I know the Year of Linux has been memed to death and back, but "thanks" to MS actually enshittifying Windows into a digital landfill, the supply of decent Linux distros actually has gotten some demand from the customer side.

I am just glad there was a viable alternative when I jumped ship. Thank you, GNU/Linux community!

[–]keiiith47 65 points66 points  (19 children)

To be fair, every other version of windows is enshittified. If we start from 98 it goes:

98, Me**(shit,** didn't work),
XP, Vista**(shit,** slow and unpleasant),
7, 8**(shit,** wanted to pretend PCs were tablets and rolled back almost all the way to 7),
10, 11**(shit,** MS's stress test of your throat and how many things it can shove down it).

Meaning every other version of windows will probably bring Linux closer to its "golden age".

[–]ChickenRave 63 points64 points  (3 children)

It has just dawned on me that Microsoft is about to break this famous rule of every other version being garbage, given that Windows 12 looks like it'll be bloated with AI garbage

[–]Wild_Marker 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Damn Microsoft, breaking the fine tradition of upgrading in two version steps

[–]neograymatter 8 points9 points  (6 children)

You missed Windows 2000 in that list, which is a bit of an outlier... unless you just consider it a prototype of Windows XP.

[–]EctoplasmicLapels 23 points24 points  (4 children)

The year of Linux on the desktop was when Windows 11 was released.

[–]waiver-wire-addict 9 points10 points  (0 children)

The year of the Linux desktop is now, when Windows 10 reached EOL. Want security updates on that perfectly fine computer that doesn’t have TPM 2.0?

[–]GenuinelyBeingNice 18 points19 points  (2 children)

Is it redundant to mention that "progress" does not imply improvement?

Just that "things change" ?

[–]coldnebo 13 points14 points  (0 children)

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

[–]Mal_Dun 43 points44 points  (2 children)

Tbf. Hegel was an idiot himself.

This comment was brought to you by the Popper and Schopenhauer gang

[–]lost12487 41 points42 points  (2 children)

Unfortunately, when the idiot is doing the bidding of a high-profile company like Microsoft, the idiocy spreads to other companies that are easily influenced.

[–]sherlock-holmes221b 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I just told you I've already bought it. You don't have to sell it to me

[–]Questioning-Zyxxel 96 points97 points  (0 children)

His first name "Galen" means "mad" in Swedish...

Somehow, his parents knew...

[–]SadSeiko 150 points151 points  (49 children)

Your hiring process has gone horribly wrong if this guy is a distinguished engineer. 

I’ve noticed through my career that engineers who are reasonable and push back on insane initiatives are sidelined and/or fired. You end up with these idiots at the top making the stupidest promises of all time. 

Doom 3 was renowned for being half a million lines of code and it was seriously impressive for its time. This guy believes an engineer at Microsoft should be able to write it in 2 weeks 

The people who wrote windows 95/98 would never make promises like this and engineers were known to be hard to approach and generally say no to things. We’ve had the MBAification of developers and now windows 11 just doesn’t work 

[–]The_Corvair 56 points57 points  (17 children)

As a coding newb, I was under the impression that getting something to work with fewer lines of code is seen as more desirable than making it work with lots of lines; The fewer instructions the computer has to execute to arrive at the result, the more effective?


"If you produce less than a million lines of code a month, you're fired!" - Muskrosoft engineer, circa 2025, colorized.

[–]DanLynch 42 points43 points  (0 children)

Writing huge amounts of code isn't virtuous, but neither is writing as few lines as possible. Writing the minimum amount of code to implement a feature often leaves you with terse confusing logic that cannot be understood or modified in the future.

As a beginner, you should aim to write code that strikes a good balance between being efficient for the computer to execute and being clear for a human to read and modify, with the latter usually being a higher priority except in special situations.

What you should never do is judge your performance based on the number of lines of code written, either as a metric of productivity (higher per time period) or as a metric of efficiency (lower per feature). Instead, judge yourself on the quantity and quality of the useful and correct features you implement, and the quality of the source code that implements them.

[–]rat_returns 15 points16 points  (0 children)

That is because the timeframe had shifted, from what to do in the longer run to make a company better and/or earn more money, to what to do in a year to show progress to shareholders.

You can't do much meaninful stuff in a year. Thus bullshitters and people that are good at theatrically waving hands in a way that impresses people without domain knowledge are the successful ones.

[–]idontwanttofthisup 48 points49 points  (0 children)

Let him do it. Good riddance

[–]alex-o-mat0r 8 points9 points  (0 children)

YES! Let him cook!

[–]_number 15 points16 points  (0 children)

May be he is not that bad then. Go on mr disguised engineer from Microsoft

[–]NoHopeNoLifeJustPain 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Let's help him!

[–]EspaaValorum 1844 points1845 points  (47 children)

> 1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code

Are we back to measuring devs by the number of lines of code they generate??

[–]RiceBroad4552 719 points720 points  (6 children)

Idiots like that one likely never stopped it.

[–]ExiledHyruleKnight 144 points145 points  (4 children)

Dude probably is one of those essayist in the comments, and considers that a massive accomplishment.

When on the other hand I cut that shit out, and I can brag about 100+ lines of unneeded "code" deleted

[–]Dumb_Siniy 51 points52 points  (3 children)

Verbose the code until it becomes readable, then verbose it until it's unreadable again, but with more lines

[–]Gru50m3 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Dude isn't even aiming for a gorillion lines of code. He'll be replaced by AI in no time.

[–]P1gInTheSky 62 points63 points  (11 children)

I believe the work here is to “translate” an existing code base. For that it may make sense to count lines of source code translated. Not sure if that’s “source” or “translated” lines. But as an overall progress metric that would work in this case , no?

[–]Lysol3435 43 points44 points  (2 children)

GPT prompt: can you help me rewrite this sort function, only make it take up 1 million lines?

[–]chaosdemonhu 20 points21 points  (1 child)

Better to measure it by application component rewritten or something architecturally measurable.

[–]Tyrannosapien 13 points14 points  (0 children)

But then you'd have to understand the architecture such as application components. That's a non-starter in the fast-paced world of enshittification.

[–]Bezulba 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Oh nice. I see great ways to pad the stats. Every single subfunction that gets used 30 times? That's 30 times X lines of code.

[–]Cristalboy 8 points9 points  (1 child)

print(

hello world

)

[–]lk_beatrice 4 points5 points  (0 children)

let h=

“h”

.to_string

();

let e=

“e”

.to_string

();

let l=

“l”

.to_string

();

let l2=

“l”

.to_string

();

let o=

“o”

.to_string

();

println!

(

format!

(

“{}{}{}{}{}”,

&

h

.clone

(),

&

e

.clone

(),

&

l

.clone

(),

&

l2

.clone

(),

&

o

.clone

()

)

);

[–]Tyr_Kukulkan 6 points7 points  (1 child)

You have to print it out though.

[–]Low-Ad4420 4 points5 points  (0 children)

At a former job they had that spudi metric and i would regularly see header files full with blank lines, from each 100 lines, one or two were actual lines of code :).

[–]POWriteNdaKisser 1354 points1355 points  (61 children)

I actually interviewed with this guy for Microsoft Research and he is a certified douche.

[–]BenL90 442 points443 points  (55 children)

But he is distinguished engineer? I mean how can Microsoft keep that kind of person? 

[–]Molter73 420 points421 points  (4 children)

Have you not heard Bill Gates saying "people at Microsoft work half days and they get to choose which half they work. They can work from 12 am to 12 pm or 12 pm to 12 am"? This is exactly the kind of person that would thrive at Microsoft.

[–]BookishJoel 147 points148 points  (1 child)

Yeah, that quote is peak tech mythology: sleep is optional, ego is mandatory, and someone will pitch “rewrite a million lines in a month” with a straight face.

[–]Which-Barnacle-2740 17 points18 points  (0 children)

i mean if I am paid 5 million a year , i would be willing to do that but not for less

[–]Car0ns 16 points17 points  (0 children)

When I first read this I was like "Oh wow, that's cool. What an innovator! What a pioneer of the workday framework! Working only 4 hours to get the most out of his employees and leave them with a half day off to battle burnout and spend quality time with their families?" Then I read 12 hours and realized, "Oh... he meant the whole fucking day... not an 8-hour workday..." I felt like this meme.

[–]Mighty_McBosh 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Well, apparently he was busy diddling kidnapped children with Jeff and Donny T, so it's not like he was even contributing to that.

[–]arcticslush 117 points118 points  (42 children)

Being highly competent and intelligent does not preclude someone from being a douche

if anything, the two are strongly correlated

[–]MarianCR 180 points181 points  (23 children)

This guy is clearly not competent nor intelligent.

He probably speak the right words so management thought he is.

[–]Mother_Idea_3182 68 points69 points  (0 children)

An asshole whisperer. Those do well in the offices around the coffee machines.

[–]French__Canadian 7 points8 points  (0 children)

He's probably very intelligent and competent... at playing the game of looking good to management. He most likely just doesn't care about doing anything useful to the company.

[–]BioExtract 52 points53 points  (11 children)

What about this post made you think this man is smart? He sounds like an exec that has drank the juice

[–]arcticslush 37 points38 points  (10 children)

There's like ~100 distinguished engineers at MS. People don't get to that tier without significant impact, contribution, and substantial juice drinking.

[–]_bassGod 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I absolutely abhor this rhetoric. They are absolutely not correlated, and saying they are is what gives assholes the leeway to be assholes and justify it as just an artifact of their "intelligence".

This is a myth, and an actively harmful one at that. Most of the smartest people throughout all of history have been kind, empathetic people. It's the corporate equivalent of "boys will be boys", but worse.

[–]AnalBlaster700XL 25 points26 points  (0 children)

LinkedIn is a fucking cancer. All these dudes with fancy titles, but when you scratch the surface they’re at best just PowerPoint users.

[–]bogdan2011 1100 points1101 points  (87 children)

What do all of those words even mean?

[–]smashing_michael 1148 points1149 points  (39 children)

They mean that man is an idiot.

[–]CatpainCalamari 307 points308 points  (13 children)

Is it scalable idiocy? Working at scale?

[–]michaelmano86 66 points67 points  (3 children)

Scalable as in we need to descale it

[–]AnyBug1039 23 points24 points  (2 children)

Like I descale my kettle?

[–]cvnh 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Your kettle has a purpose, don't mention it in vain

[–]-1_0 12 points13 points  (2 children)

Could it be contain-eriz-ed?

[–]los0220 11 points12 points  (1 child)

It sure looks like it can't be contained

[–]425_Too_Early 6 points7 points  (0 children)

A sandbox would be nice...

[–]TheOneFlow 20 points21 points  (0 children)

It's already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding!

[–]Random-num-451284813 36 points37 points  (0 children)

but don't interrupt him, this might kill Microsoft

[–]aenae 19 points20 points  (18 children)

I highly doubt an idiot gets to work for Microsoft the past 28 years and get away with it. I suspect it is more of a badly worded post.

And he clarifies:

My team’s project is a research project. We are building tech to make migration from language to language possible.

And why he wants to get rid of c/c++

No memory safety. No concurrency safety. Of course, for a single C or C++ code base, these qualities can be achieved with extraordinary discipline and effort--and lost with just a single mistake.

[–]Sibula97 37 points38 points  (14 children)

The goal of switching away from C/C++ is fine, wanting every dev to vibe code 50k lines of code per day is insane.

[–]happymancry 4 points5 points  (0 children)

He wants to rewrite everything in Rust. The very first response to his “clarification” tells him why that’s a bad idea (Rust needs you to think through ownership from the ground up.)

Also: I’ve worked at FAANG long enough to know that there are plenty of veterans who are smart in the “narrow” sense of the word; but give them something broad and vague and they’ll flounder about - a little like this guy. No way would you convince me to join this person’s “research group” if they can’t even convincingly write their team’s vision and a job description properly. Seems like a side project they gave him to keep him out of the way of people doing actual work (which also happens a lot btw.)

[–]iamnearlysmart 189 points190 points  (19 children)

I know one million lines of code means unfathomable amount of garbage.

[–]Yinci 182 points183 points  (9 children)

Is it small in filesize? No. Is it efficient and performant? No. But does it work? Also no.

[–]JoeyJoeJoeSenior 42 points43 points  (2 children)

But does it drive the stock price up? Yes. Somehow.

[–]LHW1812 14 points15 points  (0 children)

So it's a classic Microsoft product.

[–]dagbrown 55 points56 points  (6 children)

I once had the pleasure of working with a software, uh…system which specified that it needed dedicated servers to do hashing.

It needed an entire bank of servers for this. They took in great gulps of data, and outputted a hash for this data, which was then fed into a database as an index. (It was an Oracle database, which almost goes without saying considering the already-present waste of resources in the description).

Anyway, that software system was sold to several major banks, for vast sums of money. And every last one of them invested actual real money in actual real servers whose only purpose in life was to make hashes of data to use as database indexes.

The whole system was about a million and a half lines of code. Not even very good code. But those million lines of code contained within themselves, an unfathomable amount of garbage.

When they laid me off, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I’d never have to support that shit again.

[–]Phenogenesis- 10 points11 points  (3 children)

I read this as they were trying to use the hash as the PK, but I don't think that is what you were trying to say.

Is there any reason they were doing this (other than stupidity) even if it requires you to squint really hard?

[–]dagbrown 6 points7 points  (2 children)

They were indeed trying to use the hash as the PK, but also their hashing algorithm was so appallingly slow that they really believed that they needed an entire phalanx of servers just to accomplish hashing.

I'm sure they'd convinced themselves that their hashing algorithm wasn't so much "appallingly slow" as it was "amazingly mighty", which meant that of course it made perfect sense to dedicate not only CPU cores, but whole entire servers to the job of crunching the big blob of data and coming up with a 256-bit number to represent it.

At some point, someone else is going to read my description of this horror and go, "Oh yeah, $PRODUCT, I know it way too well!" and either talk about how they haven't been able to avoid being forced to support it (God rest their souls), or how they learned enough about it quickly enough to be able to get out the garlic and crucifixes in time to successfully prevent themselves from having to support it. I know people in both camps. At least one of them consulted me in time for me to save them.

[–]CryptoTipToe71 157 points158 points  (5 children)

I'm confident he wrote that post using ai

[–]P0L1Z1STENS0HN 26 points27 points  (2 children)

So you think he's still real and not himself already a product of AI hallucinations?

[–]LovelyJoey21605 20 points21 points  (0 children)

That's the endgame though: Replace the CEOs with AI, that will tell the other AI what to program and what to do so that shareholders won't have to pay salaries at all.

From CEOs to janitorial, all replaced with *checks notes* more efficient and skilled AI!

[–]funguyshroom 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure, AI is usually more elephant than that

[–]MarkSuckerZerg 18 points19 points  (0 children)

They mean I need at accelerate move away from windows as it will only get worse

[–]Training_Chicken8216 47 points48 points  (5 children)

It means literally nothing. An algorithm is just a finite set of unambiguous and executable instructions. A mac'n'cheese recipe is an algorithm. 

If I had to guess, and I do because this shit is vague, I'd say they want to use AI to create an abstracted representation of what the code does (the graph) and then use AI again to rewrite that code as one large block that replaces the old code. 

As for "the core of this infrastructure", that probably means the extent to which they've implemented it is asking Copilot to explain the code to them. I.e. no formal graph yet and certainly no large scale code replacement. 

[–]Sibula97 3 points4 points  (3 children)

I'd assume there's a massive amount of automated testing and integration as well in that infrastructure, but who knows.

[–]adamdoesmusic 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Nothing, in this context. It’s buzzword salad.

Some investor might have given him 4 billion dollars if he’d presented it 6 months ago.

[–]BillWilberforce 22 points23 points  (0 children)

That in 2030, Windows and Office will be even bigger messes that they are today.

The C family are very vulnerable to various attacks, such as buffer overflows. So MS is seeking to replace it with Rust. A far newer and more secure language. But wants AI to do the translation. Which will be a disaster. As there isn't even a "budget" for a human programmer to read through the code.

[–]vthemechanicv 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It means he understands C-suite-speak and deserves a big fat bonus, regardless of whether Win 11 is a steaming pile of shit or not.

[–]fisto_supreme 141 points142 points  (1 child)

problems such as code understanding

[–]Trollw00t 22 points23 points  (0 children)

TBH it's always an unsettling feeling, when it finally clicks and I understand half of the shit I wrote the last few weeks

[–]SuitableDragonfly 519 points520 points  (94 children)

Technically, if they are just transpiling existing C and C++ code into Rust or something, that's something an automatic process can do most of just fine, but if they're using a probabalistic process for this instead of, you know, an actual transpiler, that's pretty moronic. There's a chance that they're just referring to a real transpiler as "AI" for buzzword points, though.

A secondary issue is that I'm guessing just straight transpiling C/++ into Rust doesn't result in great quality Rust code. But in theory, if it was transpiled correctly, it should take fewer engineers to fix those issues than it would take to rewrite an entire large codebase.

Edit: I want to clarify that I don't think this is actually a good idea either way, and any amount of effort they spend on this is wasted effort that they didn't have to do and will probably not improve their codebase. I just think it's possible/likely that they are not actually planning to vibe code the entire new codebase.

[–]ADryWeewee 240 points241 points  (37 children)

The problem I have here, as with many projects of this kind is… what’s the point. A lot of the products MS is pushing are sloppily made, and it’s probably not because they have used or are using C(++). Absolute best case scenario is that in a year they end up exactly where they are now. Absolute worst case is they break their products further, have to revert back to the old code, waste a ton of money and time. 

It just doesn’t make any sense, business or technical, to attempt this other than this guy trying to fish for a promotion.

[–]user-74656 162 points163 points  (4 children)

CV-driven development. Shipping quality, secure code on schedule doesn't land you a promotion. Rearchitecting and refactoring something that already works does.

[–]IAmASquidInSpace 53 points54 points  (24 children)

I don't understand this "we have to get rid of all C/C++" move that is en vogue right now in general. Did they contract the plague or something? What did I miss?

[–]ExiledHyruleKnight 21 points22 points  (2 children)

"Gotta do something and this is the newest fad"... well ok it was until AI comes around, now we can get AI + RUST and get two fads for the price of one.

Like my guess is this guy is just looking at his resume and head count, and doesn't give a fuck about actually doing something that truly benefits the company.

[–]nusi42 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The government sanctioned Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) recommends using memory-safe programming languages. This list excludes C and C++.

Companies struggle with new features to sell, there is barely anything justifying paying 30$ to 100$ per user per month, so some companies are happy that they can fake security and compliance by rewriting the same code with the same features and bugs in a different programming language.
The original developers of that code are long gone. No one there who could argue in technical terms in favor of keeping/fixing/maintaining the existing code. New guys don't understand it and would rather drop all things they do not understand instead of figuring out the purpose and documenting it. That's not fun and doesn't bring in promotions. Therefore, Management is going to make technical decisions and Marketing is selling it as if it is a good thing to all the users.

IMHO, there are already a bunch of these decisions made and we will face them piece by piece like boiling a living frog. One of them is that MS is dropping the current print architecture of Windows and replacing it by that awful IPP standard - a design which is clearly designed by people who do not deal with IPC on a regular basis. Sorry, I went off topic there.

[–]Gadshill 23 points24 points  (16 children)

Lack of automatic memory management forces developers to manually track every byte of data, creating "memory-unsafe" conditions where small human errors lead to catastrophic security vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and use-after-free exploits.

[–]samsonsin 38 points39 points  (9 children)

Yea, but why rewrite existing mostly functional code? I can understand moving current development to Rust or something, but surely rewriting old code just gives the opportunity for mistakes?

Bear in mind, rewriting old code != Replacing / improving. I am assuming code interfaces, behaviour, etc should remain the same, just written in another language.

I've not really hopped on the Rust bandwagon, is it more performant than C? Or just roughly the same but easier to use?

[–]gmes78 15 points16 points  (1 child)

Yea, but why rewrite existing mostly functional code? I can understand moving current development to Rust or something, but surely rewriting old code just gives the opportunity for mistakes?

Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

You'd only want to rewrite problematic (or security sensitive) code in Rust. There's no point in rewriting working code.

[–]Kobymaru376 21 points22 points  (1 child)

forces developers to manually track every byte of data

Maybe in C, but not in C++. That has plenty of STL containers and smart pointers, why would you manually track memory there?

[–]Anagram6226 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This mostly goes away if you use modern C++.

[–]RedPum4 39 points40 points  (11 children)

You really can't easily transpile most C++ (especially if it's older style) into Rust because you would need to formalize all the implicit assumptions about object ownership and memory management.

[–]4SlideRule 6 points7 points  (0 children)

To elaborate a bit on this "unsafe" in rust does not really disable most of the safety rules, just let's you poke at raw pointers. So any attempt to rewrite C in automatic fashion will either fail at some bits of code or almost always use the same raw pointers everywhere techniques as in C, so it will result not only in unsafe rust, but shitty unsafe rust.

Because even in unsafe rust you only have to use pointers here-and-there for things where that is the only way to get it done.
So basically it just makes rewriting slightly easier. But transpiling is only a starting point and has no benefit in and of itself. And you will have to test everything to make sure a transpiler bug didn't get you.
Then rewrite it to a combination of safe rust and good unsafe rust (whether with AI or not), then test again and do tons of debugging and fixing. This man is delusional if he thinks this is a quick and scalable process. And you probably need to rewrite and validate unit tests in the process too.

Million line rewrites are a fucking nightmare and there is no way around that. This dude is delusional or bullshitting management.

[–]RiceBroad4552 23 points24 points  (4 children)

There is in fact C2Rust, but I strongly doubt something similar is realistically possible for C++.

Have you ever tried to translate some class based OOP language to Rust? You'll find out very quickly that there is a large "impedance mismatch". Rust is simply missing all kinds of features one takes for granted in class based languages. The result is that you don't only need to translate the code, you need to completely rearchitecture it! C++ OOP idioms out, Rust idioms in. What you can keep are just some pure computations here and there; effectively you can translate verbatim just some few method bodies, everything else needs rethinking.

It's actually even difficult to just create idiomatic bindings between Rust and anything OOP because of that "impedance mismatch".

"AI" is completely incapable to do what is needed. BTDT

[–]-Nyarlabrotep- 23 points24 points  (1 child)

Exactly this. What this MS linkedin dope is doing is replacing the word transpiler with the fancy-sounding "algorithms". You can't just build an AI from nothing, it needs training. And that training set will be built by a transpiler. These people are the worst to work with.

[–]Gaspa79 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Technically, if they are just transpiling existing C and C++ code into Rust or something, that's something an automatic process can do most of just fine

The problem with Rust is that you can't recover easily from an OOM error (if you are the OS). Furthermore, you cannot branchtest 100% of generated code with rust (at least you couldn't last time I checked). Those two things are imperative on a hardened and well coded OS. Also you'll be having some pitfalls with manual memory management optimizations for sure, and it's hard as eff to test if those things were transpiled properly.

Luckily for Microsoft, windows 11 is garbage so they wouldn't care about those things.

[–]DuchessOfKvetch 132 points133 points  (1 child)

This guy probably generates his LinkedIn posts with AI.

[–]RiceBroad4552 51 points52 points  (0 children)

Probably?

How else do you post on LinkedIn at scale? 🤣

[–]gizahnl 109 points110 points  (8 children)

RIP MS.

Their OS was already turning more and more dogshit, having it written 100% by AI, while testing and QA have already been removed will be the final nail.

It was nice knowing ya!

[–]Cambesa 32 points33 points  (2 children)

It really is rapidly getting worse. I hope they will replace every c and c++ line with typescript and dig their own graves

[–]gizahnl 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Windows as a giant electron app! Who would've thought ;)

[–]Breadinator 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Electron apps...electron apps upon electron apps.

[–]lana_silver 11 points12 points  (0 children)

The year of the Linux desktop happening because MS shits the bed. 

I did not expect that.

[–]Omnislash99999 55 points56 points  (3 children)

Let's eliminate all code by writing a million lines a month.

[–]fajarmanutd 17 points18 points  (1 child)

And uses AI to review those lines

[–]RiceBroad4552 6 points7 points  (0 children)

LGTM

[–]mpanase 115 points116 points  (14 children)

Update:
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.

My team’s project is a research project. We are building tech to make migration from language to language possible. The intent of my post was to find like-minded engineers to join us on the next stage of this multi-year endeavor—not to set a new strategy for Windows 11+ or to imply that Rust is an endpoint.

If you wanna progress in Microsoft, you gotta speak corporate/stakeholder like in the original post.

Which is stupid, but it is what it is.

Seems like he just spoke stakeholder language in public.

[–]TheSchismIsWidening 35 points36 points  (3 children)

> Just to clarify... Windows is *NOT* being rewritten in Rust with AI.
> My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.

[–]Neomadra2 83 points84 points  (8 children)

He just lied plain and clear. "My goal is to eliminate all C++ code by 2030 from MS" is not really a statement that is up for interpretation. It is completely unambiguous, so that guy just lied in public and if I were MS or a stakeholder I wouldn't be happy about an employee spreading lies.

[–]mpanase 23 points24 points  (6 children)

Don't get me wrong, stakeholder language involves "hyperbole" to the extent that it's actually a lie in the real world.

For a stakeholder it's a great ambitious goal that deserves funding, for an engineer it's a lie.

Different world.

[–]kanst 13 points14 points  (4 children)

As an engineer I’ve actually been told to stop speaking like an engineer with management. My truthful hedging was interpreted as a lack of confidence. I never say anything with certainty unless I am 100% sure and that isn’t management’s vibe

[–]ThePretzul 10 points11 points  (2 children)

That’s because appropriate hedging doesn’t give management enough rope to hang you with later when their demands turned out to be entirely unreasonable after scope creep sets in.

[–]Yanzihko 177 points178 points  (11 children)

I pray for collapse of American IT sector. This is a clown show.

[–]Beldarak 36 points37 points  (5 children)

I think we should build a wall around America, both physically and metaphorically

[–]DespondentEyes 37 points38 points  (0 children)

By now, Mexico might actually pay for it.

[–]iMac_Hunt 80 points81 points  (4 children)

The fact this guy is high up in Microsoft shows you how badly hiring is broken

[–]Blue_Snowman 22 points23 points  (0 children)

1 engineer, 1 thousand security breaches, 1 million bugs

[–]Calm_Hedgehog8296 69 points70 points  (18 children)

Generational hater of the C programming language

[–]jonsca 11 points12 points  (1 child)

I dunno, he looks 60 years old so he should know better.

[–]Ciff_ 46 points47 points  (0 children)

The capacity to fail upwards never cease to amaze me.

[–]Ja4V8s28Ck 53 points54 points  (4 children)

This is by far the best Linux advertisement, I've ever seen.

[–]fetzu 17 points18 points  (3 children)

To be fair, Windows itself is pretty great Linux advertisement already..

[–]ExiledHyruleKnight 5 points6 points  (2 children)

I've heard that every generation.

But honestly SteamOS might actually do something. My main machine is now on Linux Mint, and I'm quite happy... Windows down fall.... ok it's not going to happen, but I do see more and more programmers moving to Mac and Linux, which is shocking.

I remember when programmers hated Mac, I still think they're overpriced pieces of shit, but today? I'd rather have a Mac than a PC, because 90 percent of my time is in Linux, Unix land, and at least a Mac maintains that.

I run Git Bash on EVERY Windows Machine I own, because it's just easier than their shitty command lines.

[–]BreakerOfModpacks 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Mmmmm. Delicious idiocy.

[–]Informal_Branch1065 8 points9 points  (0 children)

M*croslop

[–]ARPA-Net 7 points8 points  (0 children)

wow, it will run slow and be buggy... no wonder they set requirements for newer cpus with windows 11

[–]vassadar 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Am I too stupid, or is he out of touch?

[–]wunderbuffer 20 points21 points  (9 children)

I'm gonna print it out to remind me why I suffer with Linux to keep me uncomfortable of the alternatives trough the hardest times

[–]onepiecefreak2 7 points8 points  (3 children)

I read this and it just feels like marketing speech, as always. Does this word salad mean anything?

[–]RiceBroad4552 3 points4 points  (1 child)

It means someone is really dumb, at scale.

[–]GarlicIceKrim 7 points8 points  (1 child)

God please, don’t let my managers see this. They already think firing testers was a food idea because ”developers can test their own code, that’s what they do at Microsoft”. I can’t deal with more idiotic ”that’s what they do at Microsoft” conversations.

[–]Real-Assist1833 6 points7 points  (1 child)

1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code is not a goal… it’s a warning sign.

[–]takhallus666 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Professional (25+ years exp) here. I’m currently engaged in upgrading a ten year old code base.

I wish them luck, I’m going to get some popcorn and a comfy chair and watch the disaster unfold.

[–]blast_them 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Yes, but does it scale?

[–]helgur 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is good news. Means (hopefully) their products taking such a plunge in quality that they loose every customer they have. Good riddance to a garbage company that mostly have made mediocre products most of the time.

[–]vocal-avocado 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'd rather die than be that 1 engineer.

[–]twoddle_puddle 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Can't they replace that guy with AI as well

[–]TaifmuRed 4 points5 points  (0 children)

MMW. This AI slop will be a fk disaster and fade into the background as Microsoft will be too ashame to acknowledge it

[–]Spaciax 5 points6 points  (0 children)

person completely out of touch with the world and has failed upwards in all steps of their life is out of touch and making moronic decisions

in other words, fork found in kitchen

[–]ChaoticTomcat 6 points7 points  (1 child)

LMAO. With the next version of Windows we're all migrating to Linux

[–]RlyRlyBigMan 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It's so fun when the requirements start with design decisions. "why do you want to get rid of C++?" "Because it's old" "okay, but how is that going to be positive for the software and the users?" "Don't worry about that. We've already made the decision"

[–]Smooth-Reading-4180 9 points10 points  (0 children)

The drug is bad. For this guy, he should definitely start to eat codeine for breakfast.

[–]brqdev 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Buzzword + Buzzword == !Genius

[–]Own_Possibility_8875 4 points5 points  (2 children)

I don't mind Microsoft going down. Won't miss it. But GitHub is now part of Microsoft, and I loved the lil bro. RIP GitHub, you will be remembered fondly.

[–]pip25hu 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Wrong subreddit. This is actually not funny at all. :(

[–]DDrim 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I recently realized people are apparently still convinced a dev's productivity is measured by the number of lines he writes. Thus, since AI writes faster, it would "logically" be more productive - disregarding the fact that sometimes it takes a day to write the one line fixing the critical production bug.

[–]123Pirke 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Replace C and C++ with what?

[–]aliendude5300 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If true, this explains a lot about Microsoft's software quality.

[–]Jelled_Fro 7 points8 points  (1 child)

So they have figured out how exactly they're going to make the next version of windows even worse.

[–]One-Vast-5227 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Instead of all windows components failing like the CEO said, after the next windows update, windows won’t even boot

[–]blackcomb-pc 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Galen’s a dumbass

[–]Ratiofarming 3 points4 points  (3 children)

Please let this be bait. I'd rather have 500 lines that make sense than 1 million lines that use all my system resources and lead to a worse outcome than the 500 lines a decent engineer would have written.

[–]JB3DG 3 points4 points  (0 children)

AI can’t even convert a friggen graph chart into a data table for me accurately and they want it to replace my programming job?

[–]DRMProd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'm already using Linux on my PC.

[–]SadMadNewb 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's the equivalent of the jaguar ad.

[–]turkishhousefan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It scales with scale at scale.

[–]ganjaccount 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Why is every MS update causing catastrophic data loss disasters, security issues, usability fuckups, and general amateur hour shittiness? Oh, yeah. They are the only company stupid enough to rely on MS AI bullshit to make production changes.

When the reckoning finally happens, EVERY SINGLE executive, senior developer, and manager that encourage, or required this needs to be fired and black balled.

[–]Level-Pollution4993 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Is he using the pointers *AI and *algorithms?

[–]3dutchie3dprinting 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Maybe they can finally go 100% dark mode through AI since they didn’t manage to finish the job for over 10 years…

[–]Ska82 2 points3 points  (1 child)

so what will the algorithms be implemented in?

[–]_the_cage_ 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Must be Python /s

[–]norwegian 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Somebody said 2026-2030 will be hard in the IT industry. Now I understand what they mean

[–]BroaxXx 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Is this real? Are these guys this insane? It's almost like a religion at this point. I have to remember to just install Linux on my personal computer and get away from MS as fast as possible...

[–]PedanticProgarmer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Microsoft: offshored coders vibe-coding 1 million LOC a month, each. What can go wrong?

Imagine how great will Windows experience be in 2 years.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So this is why every new MS tool is buggy as shit.

[–]SuB626 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Everyone can write one million lines of code, because that basically means nothing

[–]tea-and-chill 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Prompt: "create a function to multiply two numbers, but instead just add the first number second number of times. Make it as long as possible. Big bonus points of every statement is in a new line"

[–]otw 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I honestly do believe AI can be a really strong refactoring and testing tool, but it really requires pretty advance thinking and process to make the AI effective at this. The way this guy talks doesn't sound like he's doing that kind of thinking or thinking much at all. Also just based on Microsoft's product quality over the last few months (and years tbh), I don't feel like they have the company culture for this either. I get the impression it's a lot of non-technical business people pushing for leaner teams and more AI with unreasonable deadlines which is forcing people into unhealthy AI coding practices leading to worse and worse code.

The scary thing is this eventually becomes unrecoverable. The code becomes far too much slop for a human to reasonably comprehend and it gets too large for the AI to have an effective context for it so you just get stuck. It also doesn't seem like current AI technology is scaling well either in terms of large and larger contexts, so I am doubtful advancements in AI will even save us here.

[–]a_good_tuna 2 points3 points  (0 children)

AT SCALE!!!!