Microsoft is laying the groundwork for one of the most ambitious software rewrites in its history, as it moves to translate large swathes of its sprawling codebase from C and C++ into Rust, a memory-safe programming language it believes is critical to the future of secure software.
“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Galen Hunt, a distinguished engineer at the company, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post that doubled as a recruitment pitch.
Hunt said Microsoft plans to lean heavily on a combination of artificial intelligence and algorithmic tooling to make the effort feasible at scale.
“Our strategy is to combine AI and algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases,” he said, describing what he called a “North Star” ambition of enabling “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.”
The post points to an open role for a Principal Software Engineer who would help build and refine the internal tools designed to pull off that goal. According to Hunt, the role is focused on evolving Microsoft’s infrastructure to support the translation of its largest and most complex C and C++ systems into Rust.
Microsoft has already made progress on that front. Hunt said the company has built a “powerful code processing infrastructure” capable of analyzing source code at scale and constructing detailed graphs that map how large systems fit together. On top of that, Microsoft is applying AI agents, guided by algorithms, to modify and rewrite code automatically across vast repositories.
The new hire would join Microsoft’s Future of Scalable Software Engineering group, which Hunt described as having a mandate to tackle technical debt at an industrial scale. The team works with internal product groups to pioneer new tooling, then pushes those capabilities across Microsoft’s product portfolio and, in some cases, out into the wider software ecosystem.
The strategic motivation is clear. Unlike C and C++, which give developers fine-grained control over memory but are notoriously error-prone, Rust is designed to be memory-safe by default. It prevents entire classes of vulnerabilities, such as out-of-bounds memory access and use-after-free bugs, flaws that have long been a major source of security incidents and exploits.
That security argument has gained political weight in recent years. Governments and cybersecurity agencies have increasingly urged software vendors to adopt memory-safe languages, with Rust often singled out as a preferred option. Microsoft itself has echoed that push. In 2022, the chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure said Rust should become the default language for new projects. Company researchers have since developed tools that automatically convert certain types of C code into Rust, and Microsoft has released tooling to support writing Windows drivers in Rust.
What makes Hunt’s statement stand out is the sheer scope of what is being proposed. Microsoft’s software estate is vast and deeply layered. Beyond flagship products like Windows, Office, and Azure, the company maintains thousands of internal services and tools. According to MSportals.io, there are more than 500 active online portals alone for managing Microsoft products, a figure that hints at the complexity behind the scenes.
Rewriting that volume of legacy code will be a monumental task. Even with AI-assisted translation, large systems built over decades tend to be riddled with edge cases, undocumented assumptions, and tightly coupled components that resist clean automation. Any attempt to remove C and C++ entirely will almost certainly surface technical and operational challenges that no algorithm can neatly resolve.
Still, Microsoft appears willing to commit resources to the effort. The job Hunt referenced requires working from the company’s Redmond headquarters three days a week and offers a salary range of $139,900 to $274,800 a year, reflecting both the seniority of the role and the scale of the problem it is meant to address.
If Microsoft succeeds, the implications would stretch well beyond the company itself. A large-scale migration to Rust across one of the world’s biggest software vendors would strengthen the case for memory-safe languages as an industry standard, and could reshape how large, long-lived codebases are maintained in the age of AI-assisted development. ,
However, the 2030 deadline stands as an audacious marker of intent for now, and a signal that Microsoft sees the future of its software as safer, more automated, and far less dependent on the languages that helped build its past.
