I hope, with the velocity unlocked by these tools, that more pure ports will become the norm. Before, migrations could be so costly that “improving” things “while I’m here” helped sell doing the migration at all, especially in business settings. Only to lead to more toil chasing those phantom bugs.

One of the biggest point of rewriting is you know better by then so you create something better.

This is a HUUUGE reason code written in rust tended to be so much better than the original (which was probably written in c++).

Human expertise is the single most important factor and is more important than language.

Copy pasting from one language to another is way worse than complete rewrite with actual idiomatic and useful code.

Best option after proper rewrite is binding. And copy-paste with LLM comes way below these options imo.

If you look at real world, basically all value is created by boring and hated languages. Because people spent so much effort on making those languages useful, and other people spent so much effort learning and using those languages.

Don’t think anyone would prefer to work in a rust codebase that an LLM copy-pasted from c++, compared to working on a c++ codebase written by actual people that they can interact with.