A bit off topic, but see how Anthropic publicity stunts went from "Claude C Compiler" with 100K LOC to the recent Bun Rust rewrite with 1M LOC (10x!) in just 3 months.

I get that it's "novel" creation vs porting, but given that they reported that the C compiler cost them $20k in API costs, the Bun rewrite must be at least $200k, maybe even closer to a million. Pure madness.

Asking an LLM tp change programming language of an implementation is completely different from asking it to code from spec. It's orders of magnitude simpler in practice. I converted some 60kloc of Java to C++ and it works. There were some issues where the Java implementation used runtime reflection because that needs creative workarounds and not all of the C++ translations worked on the first try. And that was my first serious attempt at a task with an LLM. I could likely do better now. An important task simplification here is that a well designed codebase can be converted in small pieces and then joined back together. So the total amount of code converted becomes an irrelevant metric.

Yes, the task is very different, but also it will be months to a year until we know the results of the bun experiment.