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

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Klonoar 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	quotemstr 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's strange how ideas seem to explode at random into the discourse despite being known for a long time. It's as if some critical mass stumbles on a thing and it becomes "the current thing" everyone talks about until the next current thing.
	▲	jitl 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		odd fallacy. things grow in popularity / awareness over time

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ddalex 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm on camp 2.

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dev_l1x_be 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We have a saying that jam is made of fruit that gave up the fight becoming a brandy.

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Rebelgecko 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Obviously someone needs to rewrite Rust in Fil-C

	▲	pizlonator 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah since Fil-C is just an LLVM transform we could make Rust memory safe with it

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int_19h 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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vacuity 4 days ago | parent [-]

> the software may be bug-free, but sandboxing it may still be desirable e.g. as a matter of trust (or lack thereof)

Wouldn't the only cause of mistrust be bugs, or am I missing something? If the program is malicious, sandboxing isn't the pertinent action.

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int_19h 3 days ago | parent [-]

If any program can potentially be malicious (which is the effectively the case today with any downloaded software), then sandboxing is exactly the pertinent action - provided that the sandbox is tight enough.

	▲	vacuity 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.