social.noyu.me

oh dear fucking lord microsoft have lost the plot

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/my-goal-is-to-eliminate-every-line-of-c-and-c-from-microsoft-by-2030-microsoft-bets-on-ai-to-finally-modernize-windows

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 😱

@hikari in order to rewrite Windows in a different language you must first write a specification for what constitutes Windows

@mcc a collection of UNIX vendors attempted this in the early 1990's and Microsoft were very upset

@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.