alt Hacker NewsAll 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
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To handle supply chain attacks, you need to know where yiur code comes from. That is often not a given when working with languages where it is easier to copy and paste in code from random other projects.
I have seen so must stuff copy and pasted into projects in my life, its not funny. Often it is undocumented where exactly the code comes from, which version it was taken from, how it was changed, and how to update it when something goes wrong.
When code is not copy and pasted it is over rewritten (poorly).
Code sharing does have its benefit. So does making it obvious which exact code is shared and how to update it. Yes, you can overdo code sharing, but just making code sharing hard on the tooling level does mote to hide supply chain security issues than it does to prevent the problem.
I doubt that ideomatic code is easier to write in C once you switch to Fil-C. Your code will just get killed by the runtime whenever it does something it should not do (and the compiler does not catch). You need to think about that stuff when your runtime enforces it.
Indeed, however Rust solves two problems in one language, the safety of managed languages, without having to use any form of automatic resource management, even if reference counting library types might be used, additionally.
As my comment history reveals I am more on the camp of having rewrites in Go (regardless of my opinion on its design), Java, C#, Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, Scheme,... Also following experiments of Cedar, Oberon, Singularity, Interlisp-D, StarLisp,....
However you will never convince someone anti-automatic resource management from ideological point of view.
Now would someone like that embrace Fil-C, with its sandboxing and GC? Maybe not, unless pushed from management kind of decision.
They would probably rewrite in Rust, Zig, Odin,... if those are appealing to them, or be faced with OS vendors pushing hardware with SPARC ADI, CHERI, ARM MTE,... enabled.