alt Hacker NewsSo 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.
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It seems like there are constant updates for 20 year old packages on my Ubuntu systems. Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa (first released April 2020) glibc had an update on 2025-05-28. Current stable updated glibc 2025-09-22. To say nothing about the rest of the packages in that operating system.
> 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
This makes perfect sense to me.
Which is why I don't at all understand the current fetish with rewriting things that have been working well for decades in Rust. Such as coreutils. Or apt.
It feels like an almost deliberate crippling of progress by diverting top talent into useless avenues, much like string theory in physics, or SLS/Artemis.
Hmm, so if they're writing new memory unsafe code in C/C++, presumably to remain within their already established and entrenched C/C++ ecosystems, why isn't Fil-C interesting as a way to thwart memory safety issues in that new code?