The Great Rewrite: Microsoft’s Radical 2030 Vision to Kill C/C++ with AI-Powered Rust

A recent job posting from Microsoft’s engineering team appears to hint at an ambitious transformation, with the aim by 2030 to eliminate all C and C++ code from its codebase and replace it with Rust. According to Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt, “My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases.

Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code’,” with the infrastructure for scalable code processing already in place. The article notes that as early as 2023 Microsoft disclosed experiments rewriting parts of the Windows NT kernel in Rust, and that several Rust-based components have since entered Windows, while Azure’s CTO has prohibited new C or C++ projects in favour of Rust.

It adds that Azure teams are using artificial intelligence to translate C and C++ into Rust, with a future goal of a fully automated pipeline for reading legacy code, converting it, testing, and deployment. The piece frames the move as a strategic, years-long shift designed to reduce technical debt across Microsoft’s platforms and those of its customers.