upvote
Every one of these posts is the same. There's this weird blindness to the problems and imperfections in Fil-C --- just shouting down. It reduces my confidence in Fil-C as a whole.

Rust, for all its faults, at least engages with its critics. I've long faulted Rust's use of Result over exceptions, for example, but the maintainers at least acknowledge that other options exist and each has trade-offs. Not Pizlo and his fans.

To be clear, I like Fil-C. It's a practical implementation of something that should have existed a long time ago. And Pizlo is, in fact, a great programmer. It just rubs me the wrong way that he can't be content with having done excellent work --- he has to claim things that his system doesn't provide (like memory safety under data races --- minor fault, but still) and claim that other systems are worse in ways they are not (e.g. with respect to Rust having unsafe blocks).

Is genuine excellence not enough? Why must he persist in claiming a false perfection?

reply
> claim that other systems are worse in ways they are not (e.g. with respect to Rust having unsafe blocks)

If considering only "safety", then Fil-C is more safe than any Rust containing unsafe blocks, no? With the usual caveats about whether an abort() is safe.

reply
He claims the system provides memory safety under data races. Does it not?
reply
If you think you like Fil-C but aren’t able to see the specific way in which it’s better than Rust (more comprehensive safety), then what is it that you’re liking?
reply
>I've long faulted Rust's use of Result over exceptions

Why?

reply
Not the person you're asking, but result types pessimize code more, add register pressure, use more icache for largely dead code, etc. They're arguably noisier at the source level too.

That said, I've spent too much of my life chasing implicit control flow to accept exceptions. Heck, C++'s "noexcept" is a strong argument against exceptions all by itself.

reply