Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
> I don’t dislike Rust
As someone who really enjoys seeing all of the different programming languages and their approaches to different problems, it’s becoming obnoxious to hear the constant battles among people who think programming languages need to become part of your identity. The endless battles of superiority and tit-for-tat responses feel petty and distracting.
It’s refreshing to get back to people who just want to try different things and experiment without making everything into a battle where each side scores points against the other.
We did that to ourselves, picking languages like football memberships assigned at birth, with religious fights on the playground.
Not only languages, editors, OS, hardware platform,...
Because when it comes to apply for a job, the HR drones don't understand that one can manage to program in more than one language, use more than a specific OS, and so forth.
It was to be those specific bullet points, and by the way at least during the last five years exactly before applying to the position.
There are also the trivia questions during the interview about obscure language features.
So this naturally spills into one's identity, going back to the primitive mind of the days humans lived in small groups and it was us versus them across all tribes.
Which for those of us that are generalists, is a big pain in some body part.
Memory safety can be defined in more than one way, so it’s super worthwhile to figure out how to define it and what meets the definition and what doesn’t.
We should do more of that as a community. It’s important stuff. Ima do my part so you’ll likely see me poke at how Fil-C does a thing that Rust doesn’t do. If you read my arguments unemotionally, I think you’ll get a deeper appreciation for Fil-C, Rust, and memory safe language design generally.
What we shouldn’t do is reduce the discussion to claiming in a blog post that so-and-so “doesn’t like” such-and-such.
I think Fil-C is awesome and I very much like the style in which you present your work as well. (Hope I'm not being too emotional here!)
FWIW, I can see where TFA is coming from and I had the urge to write something "in defense of Rust" after listening to / reading some of your recent comments. I think your sister comment about the limits to Rust memory safety being real as much as the limits to Fil-C's performance and practicality is spot on, but the feeling (those emotions again) one gets from much of your commentary is that you downplay the latter quite a bit.
I think the real argument for Fil-C is that you aren't going to "rewrite in Rust" but you can often realistically recompile in Fil-C and pay the performance penalty; the fact that that Rust rewrite could also end up less safe is I think should be argued mainly from the AI angle where the only practical way is an LLM based rewrite but that would have a load of unsafe - way more than a "proper" rewrite - to be practical and the recent $100K Bun rewrite is a testament to that.
(I would love nothing more than for Fil-C to become as widely used as it practically can, since no other approach does nearly as much to secure C / C++ code and a lot of said code is out there; and security aside, it could prevent a lot of data corruption that most major C++ programs gift to their users.)