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Introduce a memory safe compilation mode inspired by Fil-C

codeberg.org

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Re: Introduce a memory safe compilation mode inspired by Fil-C

#31

Post by alexrp »

chlorion wrote: post #25
alexrp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Zig issue tracker is for technical discussion; you are more than welcome to engage and debate the idea on its merits. But we do indeed delete meta-commentary, wild speculation, and outright hostility.

Apparently I'm not. Directly from andrewk himself: If you want to comment in this thread, please either have your open source zig project(s) visible on your codeberg profile, or be Fil Pizło, otherwise zig issue tracker is not interested in what you have to say This itself is hostility towards anyone who isn't a zig expert pretty much.

You don't need to be a Zig expert, but you do need to at least be invested in the Zig ecosystem in some way.

I think it's reasonable for any open source project to only be interested in the opinions of its actual users, especially when obvious social media brigading is taking place.

If I -- having written precisely 5 lines of Rust in my life -- showed up on the Rust issue tracker and started expressing my opinions on the future direction of the project and debating a proposed feature, I would absolutely expect people to be annoyed about the noise I'm generating.

Re: Introduce a memory safe compilation mode inspired by Fil-C

#35

Post by pjmlp »

kennykartman wrote: post #2

Zig main dev proposes to introduce a Fil-C like compilation mode to make zig safe: it's only natural to mention how that's different from Rust, right? What about all the other languages, Andrew? I'm tired to see zig head people trying to diss Rust whenever they can. It's annoying for people that enjoy both languages and it's really a hint of how toxic the zig community is.

I keep repeating the Modula-2/Object Pascal with curly brackets example.

Zig would be a good fit in the 1990's, it is out of place in the 21st century, when we know better and better type systems became more widespread in mainstream computing.

Lets not forget, Cyclone, the inspiration for Rust's typesystem, was created by AT&T, the place where UNIX and C were born, as and I quote from their site,

> Cyclone thus tries to fill an empty niche: the safe language with C’s level of control and efficiency.

https://cyclone.thelanguage.org/wiki/Why%20Cyclone/

The UNIX and C creators, after C got standardised, kept experimenting with Alef, Limbo and finally ended up with Go.

Alef failed because according to Rob Pike,

"Problem: with C's memory model in a concurrent world, hard to know when to free items.

All the other languages in this talk are garbage-collected, which is essential to easy concurrent programming."

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/talks/slides/emerging-languages-cam...

Then we have Zig advocating for use-after-free solutions, that for all practical purposes have existed for decades, we already had Insure++, PurifyPlus, BoundsChecker in the 1990's.

And now we get Fil-C, which in case they haven't been paying attention, uses a GC, go figure!

Re: Introduce a memory safe compilation mode inspired by Fil-C

#36

Post by pjmlp »

andrewflnr wrote: post #12
kennykartman wrote: post #2

Zig main dev proposes to introduce a Fil-C like compilation mode to make zig safe: it's only natural to mention how that's different from Rust, right? What about all the other languages, Andrew? I'm tired to see zig head people trying to diss Rust whenever they can. It's annoying for people that enjoy both languages and it's really a hint of how toxic the zig community is.

They focus on Rust because it's the global standard everything is compared to these days. It would be good for it to have some competition, even if we also wish its critics were more careful in their phrasing.

Not when one isn't against the use of managed languages in systems programming, like Swift, D, C# (AOT), Nim, OCaml or oldies that lost the language wars from the 90's, like Modula-3, Oberon, Component Pascal,...

Re: Introduce a memory safe compilation mode inspired by Fil-C

#37

Post by dminik »

I'm having a hard time squaring together two of the claims Andrew makes here:

- No source changes - https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/36237#issuecomment-1...

- No escape hatches - main post

Surely there are already projects out there that rely on behaviours prohibited by Fil-C. One example that immediately comes to mind is reliance on external/C libraries.

Overall, I think adding it as a build target/ABI to the main compiler is pretty neat, but I do agree that it seems quite against the spirit of Zig (no hidden allocations, no hidden control flow). Combined with the combative title, I wonder how much of this is just "if I give them this, they will shut up about Rust."

Re: Introduce a memory safe compilation mode inspired by Fil-C

#38

Post by pjmlp »

dminik wrote: post #37

I'm having a hard time squaring together two of the claims Andrew makes here: - No source changes - https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/36237#issuecomment-1... - No escape hatches - main post Surely there are already projects out there that rely on behaviours prohibited by Fil-C. One example that immediately comes to mind is reliance on external/C libraries. Overall, I think adding it as a build target/ABI to the…

More like, we might shut up about use after free not being better than what C and C++ tooling has already provided for the last 30 years.

Also, Fil-C also makes use of GC technology, which is kind of ironic.

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