Microsoft has a whole team dedicated to eliminating “every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” which includes Windows 11.

As delusional as this idea might sound, one of the distinguished engineers at Microsoft is actually quite confident about the company’s plans, all thanks to “AI.” Microsoft proudly says it’s using AI to rewrite C and C++ code in Rust, and it’s hoping to replace every line of C and C++ in the company’s products.

Microsoft’s love for Rust is not exactly newfound, and nobody really hates Rust for all good reasons. For example, Microsoft recently made Windows APIs ready for Rust developers. There’s also a repo on GitHub called “windows-rs,” which is a Rust projection (bindings + glue) of the Windows API, so Rust code can call Win32, COM, and WinRT the same way C++ or C# would.

Microsoft also has a separate effort for Rust driver development (windows-drivers-rs on GitHub), which shows the company is exploring Rust beyond apps, too. And it turns out this whole “optimize for Rust” was not a one-off project or fancy “open-source” work, as the company is really serious about Rust.

In a job listing, Galen Hunt, who has been with Microsoft for the past three decades and is currently a Distinguished Engineer, confirmed that his team has an opening for an “IC5 Principal Software Engineer.”

Microsoft has thousands of Principal Software Engineers, so I am not making a news out of it, but this particular phrase in the job listing is very interesting:

“…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.”

All of that might sound delusional if you realize Windows is primarily written in C and C++, but Microsoft insists everything is possible when an engineer can use AI to write more than a million lines of code every month.

A single engineer and one million lines of code, and you’ll have “C and C++” eliminated from Microsoft, including Windows.

“1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”.

“Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,” Microsoft’s Galen Hunt wrote in a LinkedIn post spotted by Windows Latest. This statement follows a similar remark by Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who previously said that up to 30% of the company’s code was written by AI, and that this likely includes Windows as well.

Microsoft has built a powerful “code processing infrastructure,” which likely means the company trained its AI model on C and C++ code (syntax) alongside Rust. This infrastructure uses “AI Agents to make code modifications at scale,” which explains

While that sounds like a good plan on paper, I beg to differ with Microsoft, as AI should be able to translate the syntax, but it might fail at the intent of the code, and that likely explains why we’ve had Windows updates breaking basic features like Task Manager or even causing the BitLocker recovery screen.

Microsoft is confident that its infrastructure will enable the company to evolve and translate most of the company’s largest C and C++ systems to Rust.

“Our team is part of the Future of Scalable Software Engineering group in the EngHorizons organization in Microsoft CoreAI,” a Microsoft engineer explained.

Only time will tell how well these “agentic” programmers will translate C and C++ code to Rust across Windows and other Microsoft products. However, it’s not just C and C++, as most modern Windows 11 code and apps are gradually shifting to RAM-hungry WebView2 or Electron.

In fact, the Outlook Agenda view in Notification Center is a web component that calls Edge processes when you open Notification Center.

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