Rust Haters, Unite! Fil-C Aims to Make C Great Again

hubie writes:

It's memory-safe, with a few caveats:

Developers looking to continue working in the C and C++ programming languages amid the global push to promote memory-safe programming now have another option that doesn't involve learning Rust.

Filip Pizlo, senior director of language engineering at Epic Games, has created his own memory-safe flavor of C and - because why not? - named it after himself.

Pizlo got in touch after seeing our report on TrapC - a memory-safe C-fork due for release next year.

"I wanted to alert you to the existence of Fil-C, a personal project of mine, which exists today, does just about everything TrapC claims to do (including being totally memory-safe), and is freely available," Pizlo explained. "It aims for 100 percent compatibility with C and C++ - just compile your stuff with my compiler and you get memory safety."

The US government and other interested parties are rather keen to encourage memory safety - something not available out of the box for C and C++ code. C and C++ require manual memory management, which has been shown to be inadequate for preventing memory safety bugs like out of bounds reads and writes.

Since the majority of serious vulnerabilities in large codebases can be attributed to memory safety failings, the common refrain over the past few years has been to develop in a programming language like Rust that (optionally) produces memory-safe code. And more recently there have been efforts to rewrite legacy code in critical libraries and applications using Rust.

There are many other memory-safe languages - such as C#, Java, Python, Swift, Go, and JavaScript. But Rust, for better or worse, has become the most commonly cited option in memory safety evangelism because it's fast, suited for low-level code, and does a lot of things well (safe concurrency and a well-conceived package management system). What's more, the non-profit Rust Foundation has been run well enough to attract funding and support from the tech firms likely to be interested in Rust's qualities.

Also, Rust came out of Mozilla, which isn't seen by the major tech platforms - several of which have their own home-grown programming languages - as a competitor. Consider that Rust debuted in late 2013 and Apple's Swift arrived a year later - during that period, Rust has attracted a broad constituency, while Swift is mainly used by Apple-aligned developers.

But the thing about Rust is that it's not all that easy to learn. So calls to rewrite everything in Rust have elicited pushback from those with significant C or C++ experience - like Linux kernel maintainers, who would prefer to continue working in languages they've mastered.

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