A Personal Moonshot, Not a Microsoft Mandate: Rust Rumors Dialed Back

Hunt has now made it clear that the goal was never a corporate directive, nor a declaration that Rust is Microsoft’s final destination.

A LinkedIn post by Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt lit up developer circles this week with a bold claim: a project aimed at eliminating every line of C and C++ from Microsoft’s codebase by 2030, replacing them with Rust. For advocates of memory-safe languages, it sounded like a long-awaited turning point. For others, it raised alarms. Then came the clarification.

Hunt has now made it clear that the goal was never a corporate directive, nor a declaration that Rust is Microsoft’s final destination. Instead, the post reflected a personal research ambition within his team, not a roadmap for Windows or Microsoft at large.

“My team’s project is a research project,” Hunt wrote in an update to the original post. The real focus, he explained, is building technology that makes large-scale migration between programming languages possible. Rust is being used as a demonstration target, not as an endpoint.

At the core of the effort is an ambitious metric Hunt calls the “North Star”: one engineer, one month, one million lines of code. The idea is to explore how AI can assist in translating massive codebases from legacy languages like C and C++ into newer alternatives, with minimal human intervention.

To move that vision forward, Hunt is recruiting an engineer to help build the underlying infrastructure. The role sits within Microsoft’s Future of Scalable Software Engineering team, part of the CoreAI group. The work spans static analysis, machine learning, and tooling designed to support AI-assisted code translation and migration at scale.

The excitement around the post reflects broader pressure on the industry to move away from C and C++. Research by both Microsoft and Google has found that roughly 70 percent of security vulnerabilities stem from memory safety issues, a problem languages like Rust are designed to prevent.

Still, the promise comes with caveats. Studies, including recent research by CodeRabbit, suggest that AI-generated code often contains more defects than code written by humans, even when produced in memory-safe languages. Translation alone does not guarantee security or correctness.

Despite those concerns, Microsoft and its peers are pressing ahead. AI already writes about 30 percent of Microsoft’s new code, CEO Satya Nadella said in April. Hunt’s project, clarified or not, sits squarely in that larger shift, one where AI is becoming a first-class participant in how software is built and rebuilt.