Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K

(theregister.com)

36 points | by pjmlp 4 hours ago ago

46 comments

  • Rexxar 2 hours ago

    They don't have to tell us they are vibe coding everything.

    - there are now ridiculous vibe coded localisation in VS2026

    - task manager started to not report cpu usage correctly recently (the number becomes stalled)

    - file explorer display the "loading" icon infinitely on some directories

    - and many other things!

    • GrayShade an hour ago

      > file explorer display the "loading" icon infinitely on some directories

      Nautilus had that feature 10 years ago, good to hear they've reached parity.

      • edg5000 an hour ago

        I love Nautilus, but the one I run (42.6) still has that ocasionally. May be fixed in latest stable by now though.

    • chrischen 2 hours ago

      The line between vibe coding and just coding has now moved. Vibe coding is specifically when the output is not understood by the prompter. Even in the back in the days of the earlier models i used the models to do my basic typing because it was easier than me typing it out…

      • Icathian an hour ago

        Your reply misunderstands the parent comment, I think. MS devs clearly don't understand their output given how garbage it is.

        • fingerlocks an hour ago

          We’re not allowed to understand it. Gotta hit your PR quota to keep your job. I wish I was joking.

    • sharktheone an hour ago

      Even if they wouldn't be vibecoding. They were able to write slop before AI

  • tecoholic 3 hours ago

        One of the thorniest conversions was the session.ts file, which was over 30,000 lines of TypeScript that touched all aspects of the runtime.
    
    This can’t be real. Single file with 30K lines? Which human being is working on it and how much RAM does it take for a code editor to load that with full symbol tree? I am genuinely curious. Is this common? I think most files I come across stretch to maybe 2-3k lines max.
    • Rexxar 2 hours ago

      30000 is not that big in very old projects with many contributors. There are always one or two files that no one wants to take the time and responsibility to clean up. And 30000 is not a big number for RAM. The fact that you find it choking is more and of an indication of how bad our tools have become than anything else.

      For example, until recently the main file for donet runtime GC was more than 50000 lines (it has since been split).

      • skrebbel an hour ago

        Copilot isn’t “very old”.

    • Zanfa an hour ago

      Behold the View.java[0] at 34k lines of human code. IIRC it’s slimmed down a bit these days and used to be more.

      [0] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

    • wayvey 2 hours ago

      I recently saw a ~60k lines / 3mb .cpp file in one vibe coded project (and yes I was a bit horrified) Surprised it works at all but it apparently does. Not really for a human though and even for an LLM it would be more beneficial for it to be split up.

      • NewsaHackO 2 hours ago

        This has to be 1) early LLM vibe coding or 2) “hand” vibe codingwhere the user asked the LLM to code sections and stitches them together manually, and the programmer is a novice. The second part I speak from experience; got to ~2k before realizing this is out of the script range and started to break it up. Regardless, it would be almost impossible to get an SOTA LLM agent to ever do this.

        • applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago

          It is very possible. Sol Max created a 17k line monolithic file in a prototype not long ago. If I didn't stop it and make it refactor everything it easily would have went to 60k. I think it's the default if you start a new project and don't define the architecture concretely with files and folders beforehand. Models have zero concept of architecture or long-term planning, they just band-aid the fastest immediate solution that gets them the reward.

          • phoghed an hour ago

            I find that specifically when you tell it you’re doing a prototype or POC, it takes that as a license to write huge single files and other shit coding practices.

      • perching_aix an hour ago

        I have seen 30k line cpp files even a decade ago (World of Warcraft server emulator, gameplay logic of a boss enemy), and was told it is fairly normal in large software (even 100K not being unheard of), so I'm not sure if it's that much of an LLM thing.

        • dgellow an hour ago

          In the cpp world that’s indeed relatively normal for complex projects.

    • brewmarche an hour ago

      Until recently the .NET garbage collector used to be a single 30,000+ line C++ file. And it was maintained by one person if I remember correctly.

    • sajithdilshan 2 hours ago

      The question should be how can they ever let that file grow that big. What kind of engineers were working on that, like I hate seeing any file more than 300-400 lines of code

      • dgellow an hour ago

        If well organized the number of lines of code in a file is really irrelevant. 300-400 loc is a tiny file in any professional project. Splitting in a large number of file doesn’t magically make things simpler to manage, in fact you fragment the context by doing that. And very likely end up with unnecessary abstractions

        • sajithdilshan an hour ago

          I disagree, that makes it more readable, maintainable and testable. Just because everything is in one file doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build the context, you’d forget what was at the start of the file when you get to the bottom of it if it’s like 3k lines

          • dgellow 16 minutes ago

            We don’t read a source file as a book, from the first line to the last one. A file is just a set of classes, functions, types, constants, and you generally navigate it by blocks. Splitting multiple functions, classes into multiple files just to match an arbitrary number of lines is bad engineering, prioritizing a dogmatic approach instead of a thoughtful one. File units should have a meaning. And there are quite a lots of situation where keeping more things tied together in the same file is a meaningful thing to do, even if the file is itself large. There is an argument for avoiding extremely large files based on the impact on the resulting artifact, but lots of tiny files (400loc is really short) pretty much always results in duplicated logic and over engineering

    • formerly_proven 2 hours ago

      > Which human being is working on it

      If you've ever used that tool you wouldn't ask this question, since it's obviously fully vibecoded.

    • smitty1e 2 hours ago

      Was the documentation for each function a full-on essay?

  • meerita 2 hours ago

    I wrote to the post of Andrea (a dev from the Copilot team) about their 800K LoC: 128 PRs, shipped incrementally. Existing end-to-end tests ran against the new code at every step.

    Total: ~1,301,378 lines of Rust.

    Production: 832,378 Unit tests: ~469,000 Combined: ~1.30 million lines

    On top of the 832K LoC are mostly tests she answered:

    > Yeap, 832,378 lines of production Rust. the +800K number is production only; unit tests are another +469K on top.

    https://x.com/acolombiadev/status/2100660224298193081?s=20

    • jsnell 2 hours ago

      > Half of the 832K LoC are mostly tests she answered:

      No? That quote is clearly saying the opposite of your summary.

  • dmix 2 hours ago

    > agents converted 430,000 lines of TypeScript into 800,000 lines of production Rust

    The +400k new lines were probably code comments the agents added to everything

    • meerita an hour ago

      832K + 469k of tests.

  • hollowturtle 2 hours ago

    > The original TypeScript implementation completed 7.55 of those lifecycles per second, while Rust running in-process managed 120 per second - representing a 15.9x speedup on that particular workload.

    Does this impresses/surprises anyone? Two folds: 1) I believe the most optimized JavaScript code could near the performance of this phase 1 port without optimizations. I would have gone with that first, many would think that would not be as cost efficient but: 2) optimizing the rust code will require 10x the effort of the 1 by 1 conversion, just because you now need idiomatic rust code that likely has nothing to do with a plain translation. So defeating the initial gain, there's nothing to do the bottleneck gets just pushed elsewhere

  • Havoc an hour ago

    Can they port their m365 chat UI too?

    Don't know what tech stack it is but I'm guessing electron judging by how buggy and slow it is

  • aniceperson 44 minutes ago

    they ported their coding harness, something known for being simply an extensible http and subprocess wrapper, into a monolithic blob. They took their bloated and slow coding harness, and turned into an un-maintanable blob.

  • amelius 2 hours ago

    Still hoping for a company to agentically port the python ecosystem to GIL-free python.

    • rienbdj 2 hours ago

      If runtime performance is the goal it’s easier to port the required libraries to another language at this point.

    • andrewstuart 2 hours ago

      I did a lot of benchmarking of Gil free python.

      Greenlets were much faster.

      Gil free python gets stuck on all sorts of python locks. It’s slow.

  • iamgopal 2 hours ago

    why golang lost to rust ?

    • Havoc an hour ago

      Either would have worked, but rust's fussy compiler & memory features is an advantage for LLMs. The more bug catching you can shift out of runtime and into compile time the better since the LLM can fix it

    • asp_hornet an hour ago

      > The software engine underpinning GitHub Copilot and a growing number of Microsoft products

      I’m guessing so it can interop easier with C/C++ codebases? Just a stab in the dark, I have no idea.

  • jdw64 an hour ago

    Now I'm starting to really feel that I should use Rust, but I have no idea where to actually apply it.

  • baxuz an hour ago

    The fuck does "agentically" mean

    • mg74 an hour ago

      Probably that they used dynamic workflows to run long agent sessions to do the conversion, like Anthropic did when they ported Bun from Zig to Rust. Minimize Human in the Loop workflows, maximize Agents in the Loop workflows.

    • supermatt an hour ago

      It’s the adverb of agentic, which is an adjective to describe something as having agency. I get it was a snark on the word, but it’s actually a legitimate pre-ai term.

    • dgellow an hour ago

      That’s they used Claude code

    • alex_duf 31 minutes ago

      Using agents?

  • perching_aix 2 hours ago

    Is that why session compaction stopped working for me in VS Code at the end of this week, or is that just the integrated extension itself having a normal one?

    Though it's the same extension that can't keep its session timestamps straight, randomly hides sessions I was just in (then suddenly remembers them after going in and out of a session), and completely shits itself visually when using OpenAI's models, so maybe it really is just the latter.

  • andrewstuart 2 hours ago

    Can we not say “agentically” please?