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Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

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Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#61

This whole thing is hilarious. In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize. In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable o…

> Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.

A couple of quotes from the article above:

"WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce crashes."

"But Teams is not the only web app causing trouble when RAM prices are about to soar, as we also have WhatsApp. When WhatsApp debuted on Windows, it was an Electron app. However, Meta later upgraded it to WinUI/XAML (also known as native code on Windows), and WhatsApp eventually became one of the best apps [... using] less than 200MB of RAM and had smoother animations and faster load times."

It seems that most developers these days focus on web-exclusive technologies and try to force desktop and system level programs into this paradigm.

C, C++, and C# programmers seem to be as rare as hens teeth today?

Are colleges and universities not teaching these languages anymore? Is this a symptom of 'cloud-first' strategies where its easier to 'just use JavaScript' for everything, perhaps developer laziness/reluctance to learn another 'lower level' language?

I really don't understand the appeal of web-centric languages like JavaScript and TypeScript in the desktop and systems realm when they lack a standard library (which genuinely scares me: supply chain attacks...), likely contributing to the RAM consumption issue as developers just keep piling packages on for one specific function missing in another imported library, and aren't natively compilable to small binaries that aren't dependent on a runtime or bulky embedded interpreter.

Yes, C# technically falls afoul of this (in .NET), but C# at least has a standard library that is comprehensive and is supported by an enterprise (Microsoft, for all its faults), not random developers on the internet.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Microsoft allowing key components of Windows 11 to be rewritten in web-wrappers is only going to drive people further into Linux, as the RAM affordability crisis continues.

Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#62

The simple fact that they have to deny it, meaning such an absurd is widely considered plausible, is already a sign of their reputation.

Have you used Microsoft software lately? After they fired the testing people a few years ago, the number of regressions I find at work is nuts.

The testing thing happened like, 10 years ago at this point.

Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#64

This whole thing is hilarious. In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize. In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable o…

Can you give some concrete examples of “cheap young” contract workers being hired to work on product features? You seem to know a lot of things so maybe some concrete examples will help.

Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#65

This whole thing is hilarious. In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize. In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable o…

> Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers. A couple of quotes from the article above: "WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce cra…

Because JavaScript makes a SaaS that a developer can throw up on hetzer in a weekend and become a billionaire.

That's the line that was told for 15 years.

Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#66

This whole thing is hilarious. In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize. In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable o…

Xbox was poised to be an earthquake to the video game industry but they squandered with the execution. Hence the layoffs to quell the market . The rest of Microsoft might go the same way. I guess now I know what it felt like looking at IBM in 1989.

This IBM?

https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-bu...

(Check attached papers)

Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#67
post #8

I am sure why people are so terminally online to care about this. Like Rust for Linux is also here to stay and we can expect that in 10-20y a large portion of the kernel will be in Rust. Obviously the post was boasting, it was meant as a recruitment ad. They actually probably got a few decent candidates from it.

What makes it inevitable?

It has been approved as the same standing as C and assembly, it is there to stay despite what the haters say [1]. Linus is behind the push and for good reasons. Android keeps demonstrating year after year the benefits, at some point I don't know what else to say.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Linux-Kernel-Rust-Support-Offic...

Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it inevitable?

Good question, it’s not. You're responding to just another Rust and/or LLM fanatic claiming they can predict the future. Dime a dozen on this board.

I will that the Rust fanatic mantle thank you very much. Check your sources though [1]. I dont predict the future I just listen to Linus.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? They will harness the power of AGI agents to rewrite everything in Rust. Sounds good to me.

One of the least fun things about a hype bubble is that I legitimately can't tell when people are joking anymore.

You should have been able to tell it's sarcasm because I said "harness the power." This phrase is only used in conjunction with bullshit.

Re: Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

#70

> Our North Star is "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code" Can someone explain this? Are they suggesting that (eventually) one engineer can produce 1 million lines of Rust code in a month? Or replace 1 million lines of C code? Using new "powerful code processing infrastructure"... but would it understand the semantics? Are those semantics clearly documented?

It is reactive exaggerative marketing sloganeering Alan Kay ridicules executives in business class for having.

A paper on seL4 mentions $350 a source line of code on a 12 year engineering hour completed program that qualifies to a quality of code behavior expected from QNX.

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