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oh dear fucking lord microsoft have lost the plot
I am nearly always in favour of rewriting things in Rust, but "we must rewrite the entirety of Windows in 5 years in a radically different language and we will achieve this with AI" is a recipe for a fucking catastrophe
especially because it's Windows. it's not a monolithic blob, it's a huge number of modular components (DLLs among other things), almost all of whose interfaces are described by and defined for C code, with 40 years of bug compatibility
and Rust FFI is inherently unsafe 😱
if they do try to blitzkrieg it with AI they're going to end up with an utterly unmaintainable codebase and a lot of new bugs
@hikari mr windows please spend one billion dollars on a stable ABI for Rust that exposes more of its type system in order to achieve your goals
@hikari in order to rewrite Windows in a different language you must first write a specification for what constitutes Windows
@hikari this is slightly more difficult than creating the universe
@mcc a collection of UNIX vendors attempted this in the early 1990's and Microsoft were very upset
@mcc (the idea of "Win32 is the stable Linux ABI" predates both Win32 and Linux!)
@hikari @mcc it's looking like the thing that will finally kill Windows in the gaming industry is the fact that, thanks to WINE and Valve's Proton, Linux now has a very close to perfect Windows ABI that can play most Windows games without much drama.
I have to assume they're going to spend at least half that time making tests to insure they don't break backward compatibility (and will still probably break it). They broke all their drivers a few years back, so Linux has more hardware support.
@hikari I mean, you can still keep the C interfaces intact, while implementing the actual body of those functions in rust. Will it actually happen? don't think so. Will AI contribute significantly to this? definitely not, unless we want people waking up at night, screaming, for generations to come
Snark
@hikari Guess ppl will have to choose which they hate more- C/C++ or AI :P.
@hikari I can't do spoilers for half a post, so sorry for the second, non-snarky post... yea, agreed this is NOT a good idea and reeks desperation to make AI $ number go up.
@hikari that's delusional, even for Microsoft
@hikari the monkey's paw curled
Whether it will be a catastrophe depends on what you hope the future for Windows will be. Personally I hope this will be the opportunity for driving computer vendors to ship with a different operating system preinstalled.
The entire idea of using AI to rewrite your C code in a safe language sounds inherently flawed. Aren’t we expecting AI to find a way to produce unsafe code in every language?
One thought I have had is that rather than rewriting all C code in a safe language, why not make a C compiler that outputs safe code? The C language is quite flexible in what architecture and ABI the output is produced for, so wouldn’t it be possible to output safe code as well? For example I don’t see any reason a C compiler couldn’t output code using fat pointers and utilize other safety mechanisms. Of course the resulting code wouldn’t be as fast as we are used to for C code, but in some cases that’s an acceptable trade off.