Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
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Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#2Circle is the real Typescript for C++, still hopeful some of this stuff helps to steer C++ into the right direction.
Too much infrastructure code and industry standards, that will be kept being done in C++ for decades to come, and need a way for improving the whole security story.
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#3Someone please acquihire Sean and his compiler! This guy is a once-in-a-generation polymath: an expert in compilers (obviously), GPUs (worked on CUDA at NVIDIA), physics and topography (JPL etc).
Buy the compiler, get somebody who could build you a nuclear reactor, drug discovery simulator and a GPU architecture. Deal of the century.
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#4What this guy has achieved with Circle is nothing short of incredible! Writing an entirely new compiler (even if it's "just" a front-end to LLVM) and giving a concrete demonstration of a borrow checker for a beast of a language like C++ is crazy (considering that he received zero help from anyone but himself).
However, I'm afraid that the ISO C++ group is not ready for his proposal. We're talking about a committee which has stubbornly and consistently shown that they are willing to sacrifice safety and ergonomics in the name of backward compatibility. The introduction of a borrow checker is a huge change that will get shut down because someone somewhere is unwilling to rewrite their (often broken) code and/or compile their binaries again.
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#5Someone please acquihire Sean and his compiler! This guy is a once-in-a-generation polymath: an expert in compilers (obviously), GPUs (worked on CUDA at NVIDIA), physics and topography (JPL etc). Buy the compiler, get somebody who could build you a nuclear reactor, drug discovery simulator and a GPU architecture. Deal of the century.
He is out of the ordinary for sure and a very smart person. But I still think that taking a more Hylo-like path to safety would be nicer and would complicate things less.
FWIW, with Hylo you would rely on value semantics, you would not need Rust-style full-blown borrow checks with viral annotations, which is what he has been implementing and you would get rid of any kind of view types for parameter passing. You would just pass values.
I really think that is the path forward to bet on.
For whoever thinks Hylo is too new or experimental, it is not the language itself what is important but what C++ can learn from it. Hylo is based in experience implementing Swift by Dave Abrahams, Generic programming from Alex Stepanov and value semantics and structural polymorphism and value semantics and related work from Sean Parent.
So even if the implementation itself is not so advanced, it is just a natural evolution of all things I just named here which have a track record of like 30 years at least in total with a lot of generic code and value semantics lessons and runtime polynorphism lessons learned.
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#6It amazes me and makes me feel slightly more stupid to discover how much more easily I grok all this Rust stuff when it's expressed (elegantly) in what is basically C++.
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#7Someone please acquihire Sean and his compiler! This guy is a once-in-a-generation polymath: an expert in compilers (obviously), GPUs (worked on CUDA at NVIDIA), physics and topography (JPL etc). Buy the compiler, get somebody who could build you a nuclear reactor, drug discovery simulator and a GPU architecture. Deal of the century.
He is out of the ordinary for sure and a very smart person. But I still think that taking a more Hylo-like path to safety would be nicer and would complicate things less. FWIW, with Hylo you would rely on value semantics, you would not need Rust-style full-blown borrow checks with viral annotations, which is what he has been implementing and you would get rid of any kind of view types for parameter passing. You would…
Maybe we could eventually get -fsafe, I guess dreaming is allowed.
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#8What this guy has achieved with Circle is nothing short of incredible! Writing an entirely new compiler (even if it's "just" a front-end to LLVM) and giving a concrete demonstration of a borrow checker for a beast of a language like C++ is crazy (considering that he received zero help from anyone but himself). However, I'm afraid that the ISO C++ group is not ready for his proposal. We're talking about a committee wh…
The ISO committee is becoming increasingly less relevant. It's ineffectiveness has pushed numerous groups to create a successor to C++.
It's no doubt a lot of work but if any of the successors to C++ such as Carbon, Circle, or cpp2 manage to release a solid compiler that is mostly compatible with C++17, I think you'll see a large migration towards it.
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#9It amazes me and makes me feel slightly more stupid to discover how much more easily I grok all this Rust stuff when it's expressed (elegantly) in what is basically C++.
Presenting a familiar syntax certainly makes it easier to follow.
Re: Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]
#10What this guy has achieved with Circle is nothing short of incredible! Writing an entirely new compiler (even if it's "just" a front-end to LLVM) and giving a concrete demonstration of a borrow checker for a beast of a language like C++ is crazy (considering that he received zero help from anyone but himself). However, I'm afraid that the ISO C++ group is not ready for his proposal. We're talking about a committee wh…
The ISO committee is becoming increasingly less relevant. It's ineffectiveness has pushed numerous groups to create a successor to C++. It's no doubt a lot of work but if any of the successors to C++ such as Carbon, Circle, or cpp2 manage to release a solid compiler that is mostly compatible with C++17, I think you'll see a large migration towards it.
I can't really evaluate your comment on relevance -- some things do seem to inexplicably bog down, but on others they move usefully and quickly. And the conservatism of compatibility really is incredibly important, which I say as someone who'd be happy (and relieved!) to blow away API compatibility (actually to use the API step capabilities already available behind the scenes, at least for ELF).
But the part about "numerous groups to create a successor" doesn't really make your case: one of the best ways for things to get into any standard is to have multiple efforts that can be used as experience and starting points for the evolution of a standard. This has already happened a lot in the history of C++