The Great Rewrite: Microsoft’s Radical 2030 Vision to Kill C/C++ with AI-Powered Rust
Ddos 
A recent job posting from Microsoft’s engineering team appears to hint at an ambitious, sweeping transformation now underway: by 2030, Microsoft aims to eliminate all C and C++ code from its codebase and replace it entirely with Rust.
In a recruitment post on LinkedIn, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt wrote:
“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”. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding.”
As early as 2023, Microsoft disclosed that it was experimenting with rewriting parts of the Windows NT kernel in Rust. Since then, several Rust-based components have already made their way into Windows. Microsoft’s Azure CTO has likewise prohibited developers from creating new C or C++ projects, directing them instead to adopt Rust.
It is clear that Microsoft’s shift toward Rust is not a sudden whim. By all indications, the company made this strategic decision several years ago and has been steadily advancing it ever since. What is striking, however, is the stated ambition to eradicate all C and C++ code—a project of staggering scale that would have been nearly impossible in the pre-AI era.
With AI now in the picture, the challenge becomes far more tractable. Microsoft’s Azure teams are already leveraging artificial intelligence to automatically translate C and C++ into Rust. In time, the entire pipeline may become fully automated: AI reads legacy C/C++ code, converts it into Rust, reviews the result, validates it through testing, and then deploys it.
The engineers Hunt is recruiting will join Microsoft’s CoreAI Engineering Vision organization, within the Future of Scalable Software Engineering group. The mission of this team is nothing less than to eliminate technical debt across Microsoft’s platforms—and those of its customers.
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