December 31, 2025 Microsoft engineer Galen Hunt briefly set off alarm bells across the developer community after declaring an ambition to “eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.” The statement, posted on LinkedIn and paired with a job opening, quickly fueled speculation that Windows itself could be headed for a wholesale rewrite in Rust. Hunt has since walked that interpretation back, clarifying that the work is a research project and not a plan to rewrite Windows.
Hunt, a longtime Microsoft engineer, initially described the role as part of an effort to “evolve and augment our infrastructure to enable translating Microsoft’s largest C and C++ systems to Rust.” He said his team had already built “powerful code processing infrastructure” capable of operating at significant scale. The phrasing, combined with Microsoft’s growing public embrace of Rust, led many to conclude the company was preparing a sweeping language transition across its core platforms.
In an update to his post, Hunt sought to calm those concerns. “Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI,” he wrote, emphasizing that the initiative is confined to a single research team. The project’s stated goal, he said, is to “build capabilities to allow Microsoft and our customers to eliminate technical debt at scale,” using AI agents guided by algorithms to modify large codebases safely.
According to Hunt, the research effort focuses on automating code understanding and transformation rather than manual rewrites. He described a system that builds a large-scale graph over source code, enabling automated reasoning about dependencies and structure. The team’s aspirational benchmark is what Hunt calls its “North Star”: one engineer, one month, one million lines of code transformed.
Even with the clarification, the project underscores Microsoft’s shift away from memory-unsafe languages. The company has already committed roughly $10 million to advancing Rust internally and has positioned it as a “first-class language” for systems development. Rust’s appeal lies in its ability to prevent entire classes of memory safety bugs that have historically plagued large C and C++ codebases.
Microsoft is not alone in that assessment. Google has made similar moves, citing memory safety bugs as one of the hardest classes of defects to eliminate, and has adopted Rust alongside Java and Kotlin within the Android Open Source Project.
For now, Microsoft’s Rust ambitions remain incremental rather than revolutionary. Hunt’s team is exploring whether AI-assisted tooling can make large-scale code modernization feasible, not announcing an imminent rewrite of Windows. Still, the reaction to his post highlights how sensitive and consequential the future of systems programming has become for the world’s largest software platforms.
