phicoh 2 days ago

Those seems to be independent issues. Fil-C is about the best way to compile/run C code.

Rust would be about what language to use for new code.

Now that I have been programming in Rust for a couple of years, I don't want to go back to C (except for some hobby projects).

Reply View 5 replies
  • thomasmg 2 days ago

    I agree. The main advantage of Fil-C is compatibility with C, in a secure way. The disadvantages are speed, and garbage collection. (Even thought, I read that garbage collection might not be needed in some cases; I would be very interested in knowing more details).

    For new code, I would not use Fil-C. For kernel and low-level tools, other languages seem better. Right now, Rust is the only popular language in this space that doesn't have these disadvantages. But in my view, Rust also has issues, specially the borrow checker, and code verbosity. Maybe in the future there will be a language that resolves these issues as well (as a hobby, I'm trying to build such a language). But right now, Rust seems to be the best choice for the kernel (for code that needs to be fast and secure).

    Reply View 4 replies
    • kees99 2 days ago

      > disadvantages are speed, and garbage collection.

      And size. About 10x increase both on disk and in memory

        $  stat -c '%s %n' {/opt/fil,}/bin/bash
  15299472 /opt/fil/bin/bash
   1446024 /bin/bash

  $ ps -eo rss,cmd | grep /bash
  34772 /opt/fil/bin/bash
   4256 /bin/bash
      Reply View 3 replies
      • nialse a day ago

        How does that compare with rust? You don't happen to have an example of a binary underway moving to rust in Ubuntu-land as well? Curious to see as I honestly don't know whether rust is nimble like C or not.

        Reply View 2 replies
dontlaugh 2 days ago

Fil-C is slow.

There is no C or C++ memory safe compiler with acceptable performance for kernels, rendering, games, etc. For that you need Rust.

The future includes Fil-C for legacy code that isn’t performance sensitive and Rust for new code that is.

Reply View 18 replies
  • drnick1 a day ago

    No, Rust is awful for game development. It's not really what it was intended for. For one, all the graphics API are in C, so you would have to use unsafe FFI basically everywhere.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • sibellavia 2 days ago

    How slow? In some contexts, the trade-off might be acceptable. From what I've seen in pizlonator's tweets, in some cases the difference in speed didn't seem drastic to me.

    Reply View 3 replies
    • kevincox 2 days ago

      Yeah, I would happily run a bunch of my network services in this. I have loads of services that are public-facing doing a lot of complex parsing and rule evaluation and are mostly idle. For example my whole mailserver stack could probably benefit from this. My few messages an hour can run 2x slower. Maybe I would leave dovecot native since the attack surface before authentication is much lower and the performance difference would be more noticeable (mostly for things like searches).

      Reply View 1 reply
      • kragen 2 days ago

        You may be aware that one of the things Bernstein is famous for is revolutionizing mailserver security.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • [removed] a day ago
      [deleted]
      Reply View 0 replies
  • Rebelgecko 2 days ago

    I imagine Apt is usually IO constrained?

    Reply View 1 reply
    • pizlonator 2 days ago

      That's my guess, yeah

      Also, Fil-C's overheads are the lowest for programs that are pushing primitive bits around.

      Fil-C's overheads are the highest for programs that chase pointers.

      I'm guessing the CPU bound bits of apt (if there are any) are more of the former

      Reply View 0 replies
  • mbrock 2 days ago

    What does that have to do with apt?

    Reply View 10 replies
    • dontlaugh 2 days ago

      Enough of it is performance sensitive that Fil-C is not an option.

      Fil-C is useful for the long tail of C/C++ that no one will bother to rewrite and is still usable if slow.

      Reply View 9 replies
oddmiral 2 days ago

I wish, we will have something like Fil-C as an option for unsafe Rust.

Reply View 3 replies
  • arthur2e5 2 days ago

    Fil-C works because you recompile the whole C userspace. Unsafe Rust doesn't do that... and for many practical purposes you probably want to touch the non-safe-version of the C userspace.

    Still, it's all LLVM, so perhaps unsafe Rust for Fil-space can be a thing, a useful one for catching (what would be) UBs even [Fil-C defines everything, so no UBs, but I'm assuming you want to eventually run it outside of Fil-space].

    Now I actually wonder if Fil-C has an escape hatch somewhere for syscalls that it does not understand etc. Well it doesn't do inline assembly, so I shouldn't expect much... I wonder how far one needs to extend the asm clobber syntax for it to remotely come close to working.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • jitl a day ago

      at the bottom of the turtle stack, there's a yolo-c libc that does some syscall stuff:

      > libyoloc.so. This is a mostly unmodified [musl/glibc] libc, compiled with Yolo-C. The only changes are to expose some libc internal functionality that is useful for implementing libpizlo.so. Note that libpizlo.so only relies on this library for system calls and a few low level functions. In the future, it's possible that the Fil-C runtime would not have a libc in Yolo Land, but instead libpizlo.so would make syscalls directly.

      but mostly you are using a fil-c compiled libc:

      > libc.so. This is a modified musl libc compiled with Fil-C. Most of the modifications are about replacing inline assembly for system calls with calls to libpizlo.so's syscall API.

      That links here: https://github.com/pizlonator/fil-c/blob/deluge/filc/include...

      Quotes from: https://fil-c.org/runtime

      Reply View 0 replies
  • simonask 2 days ago

    Unsafe Rust actually has a great runtime analyzer: Miri. It's very easy to just run `cargo +nightly miri test` in your project to get some confidence in the more questionable choices along the way.

    Reply View 0 replies