Comment by quotemstr 2 days ago
I can't wait for all the delicious four-way flamewars. Choose your fighter!
1) Rewrite X in Rust
2) Recompile X using Fil-C
3) Recompile X for WASM
4) Safety is for babies
There are a lot of half baked Rust rewrites whose existence was justified on safety grounds and whose rationale is threatened now that HN has heard of Fil-C
We have a saying that jam is made of fruit that gave up the fight becoming a brandy.
Yeah since Fil-C is just an LLVM transform we could make Rust memory safe with it
It's not an either-or (well, except for this last item).
It seems sensible to not write new software in plain C. Rust is certainly a valid choice for a safer language, but in many cases overkill wrt how painful the rewrite is vs benefits gained from avoiding a higher-level memory-safe one like OCaml.
At the same time, "let's just rewrite everything!" is also madness. We have many battle-tested libraries written in C already. Something like Fil-C is badly needed to keep them working while improving safety.
And as for wasm, it's sort of orthogonal - whether you're writing in C or in Rust, the software may be bug-free, but sandboxing it may still be desirable e.g. as a matter of trust (or lack thereof). Also, cross-platform binaries would be nice to have in general.
I should have elaborated. If a program is known to be malicious, or should be treated as malicious, then it should probably be terminated. Given a potentially malicious program and no easy way to determine (lack of) malice, sandboxing is a reasonable measure.
Fil-C has come up on HN plenty of times before. If it was going to make much of a dent in the discussions, it would have by now.