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carbon, and the newly announced alpha stage efforts called cppfront, can potentially act as a "typescript" for c++, new compiler can enforce memory safety at an

carbon, and the newly announced alpha stage efforts called cppfront, can potentially act as a "typescript" for c++, new compiler can enforce memory safety at an upper layer before they're converted to c++, maybe there is hope for c/c++ code for years to come as long as they keep fixing issues along the way.

solomatov 4y ago
Having written enough Rust code, I could bet that it won't be an easy task to rewrite C/C++ code with a borrow checked language. You just need to write code differently for this approach to work.
- sseagull 4y ago
  This is kind of the argument though. People are likely to migrate existing code if it’s easy enough. If they have to rewrite the whole thing, then it’s not often going to be done.
kllrnohj 4y ago
Is anyone attempting to do the same with C though? Carbon & cppfront, if successful, would only "save" C++. C would still be left out to dry. Then again, the C committee is also pretty much phoning it in and has been for quite a while now.
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  Yes. Microsoft Research is working on "Checked C": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/checked-c/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/checked-c/ As a test, someone ported FreeBSD's networking stack to Checked C. It was easy and there was no overhead to performance and binary size.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    That's pretty interesting. It really undersells itself in the intro description where it sounds something more like clang's ubsan -fsanitize=bounds, but in actuality it's adding other features as well including generics. Although that said, it's somewhat odd that memory lifetime is entirely ignored by it. All the changes seem to be laser focused on bounds checks and bounds checks only (with generics being to eliminate `void*` specifically so that, you guessed it, bounds checking can be done)
- imron 4y ago
  > Is anyone attempting to do the same with C though? Absolutely. In fact cfront preceded cppfront by many years ;-)

solomatov 4y ago

Having written enough Rust code, I could bet that it won't be an easy task to rewrite C/C++ code with a borrow checked language. You just need to write code differently for this approach to work.

sseagull 4y ago
This is kind of the argument though. People are likely to migrate existing code if it’s easy enough. If they have to rewrite the whole thing, then it’s not often going to be done.

kllrnohj 4y ago

Is anyone attempting to do the same with C though? Carbon & cppfront, if successful, would only "save" C++. C would still be left out to dry. Then again, the C committee is also pretty much phoning it in and has been for quite a while now.

sanxiyn 4y ago
Yes. Microsoft Research is working on "Checked C": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/checked-c/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/checked-c/ As a test, someone ported FreeBSD's networking stack to Checked C. It was easy and there was no overhead to performance and binary size.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  That's pretty interesting. It really undersells itself in the intro description where it sounds something more like clang's ubsan -fsanitize=bounds, but in actuality it's adding other features as well including generics. Although that said, it's somewhat odd that memory lifetime is entirely ignored by it. All the changes seem to be laser focused on bounds checks and bounds checks only (with generics being to eliminate `void*` specifically so that, you guessed it, bounds checking can be done)
imron 4y ago
> Is anyone attempting to do the same with C though? Absolutely. In fact cfront preceded cppfront by many years ;-)