GitHub Copilot is now written entirely in Rust, with AI agents doing most of the porting work.
The migration cost about $120,000 in AI token usage plus about three weeks of a developer's time.
The effort updated the runtime module-by-module until the job was completed, spanning over 135 releases across a 14.5-week time period.
430,000 lines of TypeScript were converted into 800,000 lines of Rust.
$120k to port 430,000 loc seems quite expensive. That's dozens of cents per line of code, and equivalent to the all-in cost of a senior engineer in London for a year.
Especially expensive when you take into account the amount of that code which must have been boilerplate & meta-code in nature, meaning it should have been straightforward to move.
If you think it would have taken a single engineer one year to do this, you must not work in the industry. This would have taken multiple engineers at least a year.
> $120k ... equivalent to the all-in cost of a senior engineer in London for a year.
The most shocking thing I've read in this entire thread. Are SWE salaries really that low across the pond? That's entry level in the US. So 90k GBP a year all in, including benefits, employer-paid taxes, seat licenses, hardware, furniture, HR? So what's the after-tax takehome for someone senior enough to convert an enterprise codebase to a new language over one year?
Porting this to rust would be a multiyear, multiengineer project normally. And in fact you would almost certainly never do it, because it would be too expensive and you'd have to take engineers off of work building new features for ages.
antonmks · · focus · HN ↗
OtherShrezzing · · focus · HN ↗
Especially expensive when you take into account the amount of that code which must have been boilerplate & meta-code in nature, meaning it should have been straightforward to move.
verdverm · · focus · HN ↗
When the Go team ported the original compiler from C to Go, they wrote a program that did ~99% of the work
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIE5nV5fDwA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIE5nV5fDwA
<a href="https://go.dev/talks/2014/c2go.slide#18" rel="nofollow">https://go.dev/talks/2014/c2go.slide#18
verdverm · · focus · HN ↗
"write a program to transpile A to B" instead of "port A to B"
freeplay · · focus · HN ↗
jubilanti · · focus · HN ↗
The most shocking thing I've read in this entire thread. Are SWE salaries really that low across the pond? That's entry level in the US. So 90k GBP a year all in, including benefits, employer-paid taxes, seat licenses, hardware, furniture, HR? So what's the after-tax takehome for someone senior enough to convert an enterprise codebase to a new language over one year?
efficax · · focus · HN ↗