alt Hacker NewsI don't understand the need to hammer in the point that Fil-C is only valuable for this tiny, teeny, irrelevant microscopic niche, while not even talking about what the niche is? To be clear, the niche is rebuilding your entire GNU/Linux userland with full memory safety and completely acceptable performance, tomorrow, without rewriting anything, right? Is this such a silly little idiosyncratic hobby?
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There's a contingent of rust fans that show up on every story about C – their premise is that C code is unsafe and most safety-critical C code should be rewritten in rust.
Fil-C is new and is a viable competitor to rust, that's why you're hearing all asides about tiny niches, unacceptable performance degradation, etc.
I am a member of this niche – thank you for the flake!! https://discourse.nixos.org/t/radically-improving-nix-nixos-...
So I don’t want to come off as dismissive of the effort - it’s certainly impressive!
The reason I’m not super excited is based on the widely publicized findings from Google and Microsoft (IIRC) about memory safety issues in their code: The vast majority is in new code.
As such, the returns on running the entire userspace with Fil-C may be quite diminished from the get-go. Those who need to guard against UB bugs in seriously battle-hardened C software in production are definitely a small niche.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also very useful as a tool during development.