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by politician 1703 days ago
I’d be onboard with a Rust rewrite of Windows. Go for it! It’s the least memory-safe OS with most problems and the widest desktop deployment. Do the Rust folks do rewrites of closed source?
2 comments

That’s probably in the works (on an exploratory basis at least) behind closed doors. Microsoft’s infrastructure team has noted they were switching away from C++, and the Security Response Center team considers it the best chance to move forward.
The business side puts a very high premium on backward compatibility. Until that changes, they need to keep around the cruft / shims / architectural bridges / glue that make that possible. Working with the raw Windows API is already painful enough^; I can't even imagine the effort it would take to reimplement it in Rust.

^ random example: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0025