> Argon agents are working on migrating C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google
Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.
> Existing modern languages already provide an excellent developer experience: Go, Swift, Kotlin, Rust, and many more. Developers that can use one of these existing languages should.
So the reason for Carbon to exist is gone. C++ code can be migrated straight to Rust without Carbon's stopgap.
I think that's overstating it. Carbon promises a reliable transition; getting an LLM to rewrite in Rust depends on the LLM being smart enough to never make a mistake that it can't catch with (existing or its own freshly created) tests.
LLMs are very good now, but they are still stochastic (when temp > 0), and Google has a lot of code -- i.e., many rolls of the die.
What you know with Carbon is that the subset of code that you can port mechanically is behaviourally equivalent to the original. This is massive, and something you can't get from LLM translation.
tazjin · · focus · HN ↗
Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.
timmg · · focus · HN ↗
I was excited to see what it would be. But I don't think I can argue that it makes as much sense anymore.
pornel · · focus · HN ↗
> Existing modern languages already provide an excellent developer experience: Go, Swift, Kotlin, Rust, and many more. Developers that can use one of these existing languages should.
So the reason for Carbon to exist is gone. C++ code can be migrated straight to Rust without Carbon's stopgap.
akoboldfrying · · focus · HN ↗
LLMs are very good now, but they are still stochastic (when temp > 0), and Google has a lot of code -- i.e., many rolls of the die.
fg137 · · focus · HN ↗
Does it deliver?
Can all existing C++ code be ported to Carbon without refactoring?
akoboldfrying · · focus · HN ↗
fg137 · · focus · HN ↗
akoboldfrying · · focus · HN ↗