Microsoft engineer clarifies speculation around plans to 'eliminate' C, C++ languages by 2030

Date:
Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:35:00 +0000

Description:
Details have been clarified by a Microsoft engineer.

FULL STORY

In a LinkedIn post from Microsoft engineer Galen Hunt has generated a fair
bit of talk after sharing his goal to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030" - even advertising an open position on his team to move towards this.

The roles purpose was to "help us [Microsoft] evolve and augment our infrastructure to enable translating Microsofts largest C and C++ systems to Rust" with Hunt explaining that "powerful code processing infrastructure"
has already been built.

However, the engineer has since updated his post to say "Just to clarify... Windows is *NOT* being rewritten in Rust with AI [...] My teams project is a research project."

Project, not plan

According to the post, Hunts teams mission is to "build capabilities to allow Microsoft and our customers to eliminate technical debt at scale," with AI processing infrastructure which "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."

Although the post clarifies that this is just one teams research, the scale
of the project seems to be pretty significant; "Our North Star is '1
engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code'," Hunt explains, "to accomplish this previously unimaginable task, weve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale."

It is true, though, that Microsoft has initiated a shift towards the Rust programming language spending $10 million towards making it the "1st class language" for engineering systems.

This push is mirrored in Googles commitments, with the firm stating that "memory safety bugs in C and C++ continue to be the most-difficult-to-address source of incorrectness, as Rust joined Java and Kotlin in the Android Open Source Project.

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/cloud-computing/microsoft-engineer-clarifi es-speculation-around-plans-to-eliminate-c-c-languages-by-2030

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Re: Microsoft engineer clarif
By: Dumas Walker to All on Tue Dec 30 2025 09:42 am

Microsoft engineer clarifies speculation around plans to 'eliminate' C, C++ languages by 2030

It is true, though, that Microsoft has initiated a shift towards the Rust programming language spending $10 million towards making it the "1st class language" for engineering systems.

I haven't used Rust yet, but I've seen people say it has benefits to help reduce the possibility of memory bugs, etc.. If Microsoft is planning to also eliminate C and C++ development support from Visual Studio etc., I think that is a bad idea though - C and C++ have historically been used for a lot of projects, and in some cases, it's still useful to be able to make use of legacy C and C++ code in a project; also, to be able to load and use libraries with a C interface in a project.

Nightfox

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