Comment by pizlonator

1 year ago

Nice to see Sean cite Fil-C, though he does it much more in passing than it deserves, considering that Fil-C gives you memory-safe C and C++ without requiring any annotations whatsoever. He cites it as a sanitizer and references undefined behavior, which isn't really how I would describe it (unlike a sanitizer, it catches all memory safety bugs, and also unlike a sanitizer, it turns a lot of what would have been UB in C++ into defined-but-safe behavior). It's a very different approach from Sean's.

For example, Circle implies broad overhaul to tooling and libraries while Fil-C implies no such thing. Also, Circle is all about not using existing compilers on the grounds that they are hard to experiment with, while Fil-C is a surgical change to clang/LLVM.

The main advantage of Circle over Fil-C is that if you pay the cost of that overhaul, you'll get performance that is better than what Fil-C could ever do even with a lot of optimization. Not obvious to me if that makes it net better, though.

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pizlonator

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tialaramex  1 year ago

For the performance, there are a bunch of people, some of them probably wrong and others definitely right, who believe they need the best possible performance from software.

You can sell these people something like Rust because you can very often either show why the "better performance" C++ they have is wrong (and if they wanted a wrong answer here's zero already, pay me) or sometimes actually worse performance. Not every time, but often enough to make a real difference. The Circle safety feature should be in the same ballpark.

You can't sell them anything that's just anyway going to have worse performance, if you could they'd be writing Java already. So that's counting against Fil-C.

  • pizlonator  1 year ago

    Java is a totally different language, so it’s not even remotely a competitor in this space. Also Java is quite fast, even compared to C or Rust.

    Fil-C is all about being able to run existing C/C++ code that nobody is going to rewrite, not even in a dialect like Circle, since the burden of annotations will be too great.