About a project to auto-translate C to Rust, and whether AI could write device drivers.
Has this happened?
Yes 62 (53%)Not sure 31 (26%)No 24 (21%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About a project to auto-translate C to Rust, and whether AI could write device drivers.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
slight tangent, but I think it would be amazing if AI could write device drivers. Full-featured GPU drivers for, say, OpenBSD. What does it need? Probably the state machines of the GPUs, how to enable various modes, how to feed data in/out of the device at intended speed, how to load shaders.
Why can't AI learn to do that? Its reward could be getting past the initialization and getting to the default state of the driver. It could be trained on hundreds of GPU drivers, not only for the minutiae of how to load values into the control registers, but the bigger picture of what it actually means.