The number of lines of raw C isn’t the only way to measure the trustworthiness of a codebase. Go, C# and friends may be bigger projects. But they’re also more mature projects. At this point, far more eyeballs have scoured their codebases looking for security bugs.
reply> Fil-C is safer than those
Says you. It seems presumptuous to me to be so dismissive of their work. The Go and C# teams do good work.
But I wasn’t even asking about safety. I’m curious about ergonomics and performance. Fil-C isn’t the only safe wrapper around raw syscalls. How is cross OS compatibility with Fil-C? How nice are the APIs to use? UNIX syscalls are pretty badly designed imo. The error paths alone are a mess.
Go doesn't rely on much C/C++, not recently at least. Particularly on Linux.
replySmall nitpick but Go doesn't really have any YOLO C/C++ code in its runtime and standard library.
replyYeah what I said is true of TS and C#, but not of Go.
replyGo’s situation is nuanced since a lot of Go code does rely on unsafe C or C++ deps, but I have no idea how generally true that is. Also Go’s protections fall apart under certain races, which isn’t true in Fil-C.
Races in Fil-C allow access to one object through a pointer to a different object if there's an attacker-controlled offset involved.
replyFil-C's safety guarantees therefore fail to apply in this situation.