Comment by achierius

> while the large slowdown is justified because it allows people to use existing C applications unchanged instead of rewriting in a safe language (never mind that these two claims contradict each other)

Those two claims don't contradict eachother. Many, many people use C code not because their application needs to be blazing fast, but simply because the programs are already written in C. Rewriting a program from C into another language is likely to introduce a lot of bugs, even if the rewrite does manage to achieve 'full memory safety' (which most don't, instead liberally utilizing unsafe blocks or the equivalent). So what are such users to do, simply accept that there are going to be bugs? Fil-C seems to address a reasonable need.