Rust's "Memory Safety" Talking Point Ought to be Discarded in Light of Fil-C
Old: What Would Dennis Ritchie Say About the "Memory-Safe" Hype (or Cargo Cult)? | Analogies for "Memory Safety" in Rust
Notes by djb on using Fil-C (2025)
I'm impressed with the level of compatibility of the new memory-safe C/C++ compiler Fil-C (filcc, fil++). Many libraries and applications that I've tried work under Fil-C without changes, and the exceptions haven't been hard to get working.
I've started accumulating miscellaneous notes on this page regarding usage of Fil-C. My selfish objective here is to protect various machines that I manage by switching them over to code compiled with Fil-C, but maybe you'll find something useful here too.
Timings below are from a mini-PC named phoenix except where otherwise mentioned. This mini-PC has a 6-core (12-thread) AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS (Zen 4) CPU, 12GB RAM, and 36GB swap. The OS is Debian 13. (I normally run LTS software, periodically upgrading from software that's 4–5 years old such as Debian 11 today to software that's 2–3 years old such as Debian 12 today; but some of the packages included in Fil-C expect newer utilities to be available.)
Today in IRC there was a discussion about Rust (see "Thu 03:49:28" onwards), which wasn't as politicised as it is in some other circles or forums. We try to focus on technical and licensing aspects, not politics. Microsoft Lunduke turns this whole debate into a complete "----show", probably by intention, so kindly disregard him and his insipid army of trolls.
When Richard M. Stallman (RMS) began implementing GNU in 1984 (after he had announced the plan in late 1983) it was about the sharing, i.e. licensing, set aside technical matters (he chose to structure things like UNIX because it was widely used and modular).
A few hours ago LWN removed the paywall from last week's 'bulletin', showing the full text of what a Rust pusher employed by LWN had covered in "Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation". A few hours earlier Liam Proven (The Register MS) did the same, citing this page.
It's good to see (more so given that I'm a C programmer since ~30 years ago) the whole "memory-safe" demand can be met without 'inventing' new languages. █