alt Hacker NewsI think Fil-C is for people who are using software that has already been written, not for people who are trying to pick what language to write new software in. A substantial amount of software has, after all, already been written.
Replies
It seems kind of analogous to disabling hyperthreading. Sure there's an immediate performance hit, but in exchange you're now protected from entire classes of vulnerabilities. A few years later, no one remembers or cares about that old setback that has been long since eclipsed by subsequent hardware advancements.
Modern hardware is stupidly fast compared to what existed at the time that a lot of C/C++ projects first started. My M2 MacBook Air has 5x higher multi-core performance than my previous daily driver (a 2015 MacBook Pro, a highly capable machine in its own right), and the new iPhone is now even faster than that. I'd happily accept a worst-case 4x slowdown of all user space C/C++ code in the interest of security, especially when considering how much of that code is going to be written by AI going forward.
It's super fun to write C and C++ code in Fil-C because it's like this otherworldly crossover between Java and C/C++:
- Unlike Java, you get fantastic startup times.
- Unlike Java, you get access to actual syscall APIs.
- Unlike Java, you can leverage the ecosystem of C/C++ libraries without having to write JNI wrappers (though you do have to be able to compile those libraries with Fil-C).
- Like Java, you can just `new` or `malloc` without `delete`ing or `free`ing.
It's so fun!