3 ms·

what is this sorcery. I was reading HN for years, this is the first time I see someone brings up a memory safe C++. how is that not even on the headlines ? what

• modeless 1y ago
  The catch is performance. It's not 200x slower though! 2x-4x is the actual range you can expect. There are many applications where that could be an acceptable tradeoff for achieving absolute memory safety of unmodified C/C++ code. But also consider that it's one guy's side project! If it was standardized and widely adopted I'm certain the performance penalty could be reduced with more effort on the implementation. And I'm also sure that for new C/C++ code that's aware of the performance characteristics of Fil-C that we could come up with ways to mitigate performance issues.
  • munificent 1y ago
    I mean, if I could accept a 2x-4x performance hit, then I wouldn't be using C++ in the first place. At that point, there are any of a number of other languages that are miles more pleasant to program in.
    • modeless 1y ago
      There are a whole lot of C/C++ libraries and utilities that would be great to use in a memory safe context without rewriting them. And it's not exactly easy to reach 2x C's runtime in most other languages. But again, I think that performance penalty could be significantly reduced with more effort on the implementation.
    • wrs 1y ago
      For new code, sure. But there is plenty of existing C code that isn’t going to be rewritten and isn’t that performance sensitive.
  • jandrewrogers 1y ago
    The design choices that make it slower can’t be mitigated either in theory or practice. C++ competes against other languages that make virtually identical tradeoffs that are far more mature and which have never closed that performance gap in a meaningful way. For the high-end performance-engineered cases that C++ is famously used for, the performance loss may be understated since it actively interferes with standard performance-engineer techniques. It may have a role in boring utilities and such but those are legacy roles for C++. That might be a good use case! Most new C++ code is used in applications where something like Fil-C would be an unacceptable tradeoff.
    • modeless 1y ago
      It won't ever be 1x the runtime, but if you think better than 2x is an insurmountable challenge then we will have to agree to disagree on that one. And for high-end performance engineering, I expect code that is aware of Fil-C could do better than naive code simply compiled with Fil-C.
• fuhsnn 1y ago
  Latest version of Fil-C with -O1 is just around 50-100% slower than ASAN, very acceptable in my book. I'm actually more "bothered" by its compilation time (took roughly 8x time of clang with ASAN).
  • foldr 1y ago
    I’ve found Fil-C 0.670 to be around 30x slower than a regular build, with -O1 vs. -O2 not making much difference. Perhaps it is very dependent on the kind of code. IIRC the author of Fil-C (which I think is an incredible project, to be clear) wants it to be possible to run Fil-C builds in production, so I think the comparison to a regular non-ASAN build is relevant.
  • saagarjha 1y ago
    For debugging, sure. Address sanitizer is itself pretty slow.