Comment by quotemstr
6 days ago
I can't wait for all the delicious four-way flamewars. Choose your fighter!
1) Rewrite X in Rust
2) Recompile X using Fil-C
3) Recompile X for WASM
4) Safety is for babies
There are a lot of half baked Rust rewrites whose existence was justified on safety grounds and whose rationale is threatened now that HN has heard of Fil-C
Fil-C has come up on HN plenty of times before. If it was going to make much of a dent in the discussions, it would have by now.
It's strange how ideas seem to explode at random into the discourse despite being known for a long time. It's as if some critical mass stumbles on a thing and it becomes "the current thing" everyone talks about until the next current thing.
odd fallacy. things grow in popularity / awareness over time
I'm on camp 2.
We have a saying that jam is made of fruit that gave up the fight becoming a brandy.
Obviously someone needs to rewrite Rust in Fil-C
Yeah since Fil-C is just an LLVM transform we could make Rust memory safe with it
It's not an either-or (well, except for this last item).
It seems sensible to not write new software in plain C. Rust is certainly a valid choice for a safer language, but in many cases overkill wrt how painful the rewrite is vs benefits gained from avoiding a higher-level memory-safe one like OCaml.
At the same time, "let's just rewrite everything!" is also madness. We have many battle-tested libraries written in C already. Something like Fil-C is badly needed to keep them working while improving safety.
And as for wasm, it's sort of orthogonal - whether you're writing in C or in Rust, the software may be bug-free, but sandboxing it may still be desirable e.g. as a matter of trust (or lack thereof). Also, cross-platform binaries would be nice to have in general.
> the software may be bug-free, but sandboxing it may still be desirable e.g. as a matter of trust (or lack thereof)
Wouldn't the only cause of mistrust be bugs, or am I missing something? If the program is malicious, sandboxing isn't the pertinent action.
If any program can potentially be malicious (which is the effectively the case today with any downloaded software), then sandboxing is exactly the pertinent action - provided that the sandbox is tight enough.
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