Comment by 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.
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.
For existing C++ just using a checked std::vector and Boehm GC can get you quite a long way.
Nowhere near to memory safety. There are so many exploits left on the table if you do what you say.
Not to mention that Boehm isn’t sound on modern C compilers. Conservative stack scanning can be foiled by optimizations that are valid from the compiler’s perspective.
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