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vorador | 4 months ago

There's a contingent of rust fans that show up on every story about C – their premise is that C code is unsafe and most safety-critical C code should be rewritten in rust.

Fil-C is new and is a viable competitor to rust, that's why you're hearing all asides about tiny niches, unacceptable performance degradation, etc.

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vacuity|4 months ago

Hacker News is not a place where any one group brigrades a thread. There are people who prefer C who don't want a GC, people who prefer Rust who don't want C, people who prefer Rust who agree with Fil-C for legacy C, people who don't prefer C or Rust and may use languages with GC.... We all have interests and face people who denigrate them in bad faith. If you have specific objections to inaccurate statements in this thread, then state them. I'll do the same for any technology if I'm qualified to make statements on it.

kasabali|3 months ago

> Hacker News is not a place where any one group brigrades a thread

Sweet summer child

petesergeant|4 months ago

> Fil-C is new and is a viable competitor to rust

I’ve no horse in the race here, but the Fil-C page talks about a 4x overhead from using it, which feels like it would make it less competitive

mbrock|4 months ago

Currently measured worst case for some types or code.

testdelacc1|4 months ago

There’s no Rust fans here, only GC skeptics. GC skeptics existed long before anyone dreamed of Rust and will survive Rust as well.

It’s a pretty reasonable objection too (though I personally don’t agree). C has always been chosen when performance is paramount. For people who prioritise performance it must feel a bit weird to leave performance on the table in this way.

And Jesus Christ, give it a rest with this “Rust fans must be thinking” stuff. It sounds deranged.

vorador|4 months ago

No, back in the day C was used for everything. Vim was not written in C because it needed to wring every last bit of performance out of text editing.

Rewriting everything in rust "for memory-safety" is a false tradeoff given the millions of lines of C code out there and the fact that rewrites always introduce new bugs.