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Comment by boulos

4 hours ago

How's your experience with Fil-C been? Is it materially useful to you in practice?

I’m biased since I’m the Fil.

It was materially useful in this project.

- Caught multiple memory safety issues in a nice deterministic way, so designing the object model was easier than it would have been otherwise.

- C++ with accurate GC is a really great programming model. I feel like it speeds me up by 1.5x relative to normal C++, and maybe like 1.2x relative to other GC’d languages (because C++’s APIs are so rich and the lambdas/templates and class system is so mature).

But I’m biased in multiple ways

- I made Fil-C++

- I’ve been programming in C++ for like 35ish years now

  • I’m curious. Given the overheads of Fil-C++, does it actually make sense to use it for greenfield projects? I like that Fil-C fills a gap in securing old legacy codebases, I’m just not sure I understand it for greenfield projects like this other than you happen to know C++ really well.

    • It made sense because I was able to move very quickly, and once perf became a problem I could move to Yolo-C++ without a full rewrite.

      > happen to know C++ really well

      That’s my bias yeah. But C++ is good for more than just perf. If you need access to low level APIs, or libraries that happen to be exposed as C/C++ API, or you need good support for dynamic linking and separate compilation - then C++ (or C) are a great choice

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