alt Hacker NewsSo, a few things, some of which others have touched on:
1. Fil-C is slower and bigger. Noticeably so. If you were OK with slower and bigger then the rewrite you should have considered wasn't to Rust in the last ten years but to Java or C# much earlier. That doesn't invalidate Fil'C's existence, but I want to point that out.
2. You're still writing C. If the program is finished or just occasionally doing a little bit of maintenance that's fine. I wrote C for most of my career, it's not a miserable language, and you are avoiding a rewrite. But if you're writing much new code Rust is just so much nicer. I stopped writing any C when I learned Rust.
3. This is runtime safety and you might need more. Rust gives you a bit more, often you can express at compile time things Fil-C would only have checked at runtime, but you might need everything and languages like WUFFS deliver that. WUFFS doesn't have runtime checks. It has proved to its satisfaction during compilation that your code is safe, so it can be executed at runtime in absolute safety. Your code might be wrong. Maybe your WUFFS GIF flipper actually makes frog GIFs purple instead of flipping them. But it can't crash, or execute x86 machine code hidden in the GIF, or whatever, that's the whole point.
Replies
All of these didn’t prevent Go from competing with Rust and I’m guessing that Fil-C will be the better choice in some cases.
Rust has managed to establish itself as a player, but it’s only the best choice for a limited amount of projects, like some (but not all) browser code or kernel code. Go, C++, C with Fil-C) have solid advantages of their own.
To name two:
* idiomatic code is easier to write in any of these languages compared to Rust, because one can shortcut thinking about ownership. Rust idiomatic code requires it.
* less effort needed to protect from supply-chain attacks
> Fil-C is slower and bigger
It's not any slower or (proportionally) bigger compared to the experience you would have had 20 years ago running all sorts of utilities that happen to be the best candidates for Fil-C, and people got along just fine. How fast do ls and mkdir need to be?
The fundamental question is that if an address is “safe” is a runtime thing, which in some cases you can decide it in compile time but not always. To force that during coding is just handicapping oneself to be “safe”. Which you can do the same in C (or mostly any language if you want it)
Yes it's slower, but it works. It's being built by one single dad who focused on compatibility before speed.
I'm not convinced that tying the lifetimes into the type system is the correct way to do memory management. I've read too many articles of people being forced into refactoring the entire codebase to implement a feature.