alt Hacker NewsThe whole point of Fil-C is that it is fast enough to consider using in production for some applications while still guaranteeing memory safety. We already have ASAN and Valgrind and other tools for development purposes, that's not what Fil-C is targeting.
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Cyph0n • yesterday at 10:09 PM
I am assuming that Fil-C introduces orders of magnitude less overhead than ASAN or Valgrind.
Also, it’s probably fast enough for apps to be deployed in something like a staging environment for integration tests to run against them. Production deploy/release can then happen using a tagged version that gets compiled using vanilla GCC/Clang.
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So Fil-C is competing with Go, C#, typescript and Python. If I’m writing a greenfield project where “bare metal” performance isn’t needed, why would anyone choose Fil-C over a more mature GC language?
C is more verbose and more error prone than Go and C#. It has worse tooling. It’s missing decades of language features. C isn’t properly cross platform. There’s no package manager. The “standard library” isn’t fully standard. It’s full of sharp edges and bad decisions.
I can imagine using Fil-C to run legacy code. But for new projects, it just seems worse in every way compared to Go, C#, typescript and friends. It’s worse, slow, and inconvenient.