Comment by jrpelkonen 2 days ago
Fil-C is an innovative approach and a great technical achievement. However, I wouldn't suggest that it is an universal solution without caveats. For instance, the performance penalty of up to 4x is not acceptable in a lot of cases.
Also, the c2rust output is rough but not hopeless: There are real world success stories of rust projects that were bootstrapped via c2rust, e.g. https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/151/translating-bzip2-with-c2r...
Fil-C doesn't stop the data race problems the borrow checker would catch does it?
Has anyone tried pointing an agentic ai at recreating a c utility by looking only at the man page and using differential fuzzing? It isn't a port, so no licensing issues, and the code would use unsafe, and presumably be more idiomatic. I have no idea if it would ever complete, or just get stuck in an endless loop. Or even if it did succeed, how many joules it would use.
> data race problems
No, Fil-C just makes races memory safe.
Also this is sort of changing the topic a bit since bzip is single threaded
Even if it wasn't single threaded, it would probably have been fine grained OMP style multithreaded which runs into far fewer issues. I was just making sure I understood what Fil-C was doing. I hadn't heard of it. It seems like a great thing.
bzip2 is tiny, has relatively low overhead in Fil-C (forget exactly what it is but not 4x), and last I checked this Rust version still has >100 uses of unsafe.