alt Hacker News> Large Scale Codebase Migrations and Optimizations: Argon agents are working on migrating C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google—scaling from tens of thousands of lines in core libraries like re2, libgav1 up to 800K+ lines for the Fuchsia OS Zircon kernel.
To me this is way more significant than other random c++-to-rust-AI-rewrite. If they can pull it off on core C++ libraries en masse, I don't know if C++ will still be relevant in a few years.
I look forward to a post from google on this effort.
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There is a blog post on (the early baby steps of) that: https://bughunters.google.com/blog/scaling-memory-safety. We have multiple AI-assisted Rust rewrites running in production now.
(Full disclosure: I am one of the coauthors)
"I don't know if C++ will still be relevant in a few years."
The standards body members are still fighting about whether memory safety is important enough to change the language for, so, I would guess the answer is "no".
The notion of human-readable/human-safe programming languages will be irrelevant in a few years, not just C++. They may use Rust, Zig, Lean, or maybe some other LLM-generated hyper-optimized intermediate language with a strong type system and compiler, but chances are, we will read less and less of it, until we basically never read code at all.
I know this is somewhat of a meme now but I do think the predominant language will be "typing/speaking to a coding agent in your native language."
If no one is reading or writing Rust code at that point, it all being agent driven, Rust itself is going to be a very short step before it gets disinter-mediated away and it's English -> complex heterogenous machine code across GPU/TPU/CPU/xPUs. Not sure Rust fans or C++ haters have thought this through.
LLM should soon be language indifferent/independent, the upcoming years Devs will touch less and less code and more of a LLM as the top interface and debugging tools as the next layer. I just can't see anyone writing an ounce of code in 1-2 years.
Yeah, if they can make it work at google scale then no one would absolutely question it anymore
> I don't know if C++ will still be relevant in a few years.
And people are worried about human extinction when this is the potential trade-off!
C++'s death cannot come soon-enough.
Seriously though, things have changed so incredibly rapidly in the past year or so. I have never been such an efficient or such a proficient engineer than I have this past year (delivering feature after feature, project after project, faster and better than I could before with better feedback from users etc) and I don't even see the code any more. It could be c++, it could be python, or java or what ever - I don't really care any more: the computer deals with that trivia while I concentrate on what to build and how it should work.
Its amazing. It really is.