Recent online discussion suggested that Microsoft might be planning a sweeping rewrite of Windows in Rust, but the company has moved quickly to dispel that impression. While Microsoft is exploring advanced techniques for translating large codebases into other programming languages, there is no official initiative to replace Windows’ C and C++ foundations with Rust.

The confusion began after Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt shared a LinkedIn post describing a bold long-term ambition: removing all C and C++ code from Microsoft’s software portfolio by 2030. The statement drew strong reactions across the developer community, particularly among supporters of memory-safe languages. However, Hunt later clarified that the idea reflects a personal research objective, not a company-wide mandate — and that Rust is simply one possible destination, not a fixed end goal.

In a follow-up post, Hunt explained that his team is conducting exploratory research focused on making large-scale language migration technically feasible. The effort is centered on building tools that can automatically convert massive amounts of source code from one language to another. “This is about enabling migration,” he wrote, emphasizing that the project is not tied to any official roadmap for Windows or future Microsoft operating systems.

At the core of the research is an ambitious benchmark: enabling a single engineer, supported by automation and AI, to translate up to one million lines of code per month. The team is currently using C and C++ as source languages and Rust as a demonstration target, but Hunt stressed that this choice is illustrative rather than prescriptive.

To advance this work, Microsoft is hiring an engineer to help design the underlying systems required for such large-scale transformations. The role sits within the Future of Scalable Software Engineering group under Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, where the focus is on combining static code analysis with machine learning to support AI-assisted refactoring and migration.

The broader context for this research is the industry-wide push toward memory-safe programming. Studies from both Microsoft and Google indicate that roughly 70% of software security vulnerabilities stem from memory management flaws — a category of issues that languages like Rust are designed to mitigate.

Still, the idea of using AI to automatically rewrite code comes with its own risks. Independent research, including findings from CodeRabbit, suggests that machine-generated code can introduce a higher number of defects than code written manually. As a result, even migrations to safer languages do not automatically guarantee stronger security outcomes.

In short, Microsoft is experimenting with powerful new tooling to modernize legacy software at scale — but the notion of Windows being wholesale rewritten in Rust remains, for now, firmly in the realm of speculation rather than corporate strategy.