I thought the point of Fil-C was to be a drop in safe replacement of C. This project existing implies it isn't. What's going on?

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torginus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Afaict, there are some patterns that are not supported, like converting pointers to/from integers and doing stuff with them like bitmasks (which is a huge anti-pattern, but some code bases do it)

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loeg 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It isn't entirely drop-in for all programs.

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wat10000 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most large C code bases aren’t really written in C. They’re written in an almost-C that includes certain extensions and undefined behavior. In this case, it uses inline assembly (an extension) and manipulating pointers as integers (undefined behavior).

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throwaway17_17 5 hours ago | parent [-]

While I’m always thankful when people give the broad perspective and context in a discussion, which your comment does. The specifics of this particular project’s usage of almost-C is not something I could have quickly figured out, so thanks. For such a large program, an to be as old as Qt is at this point, I find it impressive and slightly amazing that it has in some sense self-limited its divergence from standard C. It would be interesting to see what something like SQLite includes in its almost-C.

	▲	wat10000 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The more portable a project is, the less weird stuff it’s likely to do. The almost-C parts become more of a headache the more OSes and compilers you support. This seem pretty tame, and I’d expect SQLite to be similar. I work on some projects that only support a single OS, compiler, and CPU architecture and it’s full of dependencies on things like the OS’s actual address space (few 64-bit archs use all 64 bits).

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blub an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

QtBase is C++ first of all.

Massive projects like Qt also push compilers to their limits and use various compiler-specific and platform-specific techniques which might appear as bugs to Fil-C.

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meibo 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not done yet.

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g-mork 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure fooled me. I follow his Twitter account and there isn't much he hasn't got building with it at this point. UX comes later. Amazing it's the random work of one person

	▲	jitl 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The author wrote WebKit’s allocator and worked on JavaScriptCore for over a decade. I really enjoyed his posts on the WebKit blog over the years like this one on the concurrent garbage collector (2017) https://webkit.org/blog/7122/introducing-riptide-webkits-ret...
	▲	vlovich123 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don’t think so much is fil-c itself, but from the looks of the diff it’s a new platform essentially. That can require porting existing software generally which you can read from the posted diff