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.
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"