Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K

ppjmlp about 3 hours ago 42 commentsRead Article on theregister.com

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Discussion (42 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Rexxar•about 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•18 minutes 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•5 minutes 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•about 1 hour 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•40 minutes ago

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

sharktheone•19 minutes ago

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

Havoc•5 minutes 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

tecoholic•about 2 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•about 1 hour 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•5 minutes ago

Copilot isn’t “very old”.

Zanfa•16 minutes 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/+/...

brewmarche•7 minutes ago

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

wayvey•about 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•about 1 hour 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•43 minutes 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.

perching_aix•41 minutes 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•28 minutes ago

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

sajithdilshan•about 1 hour 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•29 minutes 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•22 minutes 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

formerly_proven•about 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•about 2 hours ago

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

meerita•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

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

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

meerita•43 minutes ago

True! I edited.

dmix•about 1 hour 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•41 minutes ago

832K + 469k of tests.

hollowturtle•about 1 hour 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

amelius•about 2 hours ago

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

rienbdj•about 1 hour ago

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

andrewstuart•about 1 hour 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•43 minutes ago

why golang lost to rust ?

Havoc•3 minutes 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•29 minutes 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•29 minutes ago

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

baxuz•36 minutes ago

The fuck does "agentically" mean

supermatt•13 minutes 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.

mg74•27 minutes 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.

dgellow•26 minutes ago

That’s they used Claude code

perching_aix•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

Can we not say “agentically” please?