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> I think an improved C can be memory safe even without GC That's a very interesting belief. Do you see a way to achieve temporal memory safety without a GC, a
by whytevuhuni 11mo ago
> I think an improved C can be memory safe even without GC
That's a very interesting belief. Do you see a way to achieve temporal memory safety without a GC, and I assume also without lifetimes?
- uecker 11mo agoA simple pointer ownership model can achieve temporal memory safety, but I think to be convenient to use we may need lifetimes. I see no reason this could not be added to C.
- whytevuhuni 11mo agoA C with lifetimes would be nice, I agree. Would be awesome if someone did a study to see if it's actually achievable... Cyclone's approach was certainly not enough, and I think some sort of generics or a Hindley-Milner type system might be required to get it to work, otherwise lifetimes would become completely unusable.
- uecker 11mo agoYes, one needs polymorphism. Let's see. I have some ideas.
- 1718627440 11mo agoC does have the concept of lifetimes. There is just no syntax to specify it, so it is generally described along all the other semantic details of the API. And no it is not the same as for Rust, which causes clashes with the Rust people.
- uecker 11mo agoWhat clashes?
- 1718627440 11mo agoI think there was a discussion in the Linux kernel between a kernel maintainer and the Rust people, which started by the Rust people demanding formal semantics, so that they could encode it in Rust, and the subsystem maintainer unwilling to do that.
- uecker 11mo agoAh, I thought you were talking about core language semantics in C.
- 1718627440 11mo agoI don't know enough Rust, to do such a comparison.
- steveklabnik 11mo ago“The rust people” were also kernel maintainers.
- 1718627440 11mo agoSorry, I'm not familiar with the titles of kernel developers. I thought only one of them was the subsystem maintainer.
- steveklabnik 11mo agoOne of them was a maintainer of that particular subsystem, but that doesn't mean that the other folks aren't also maintainers of other parts of the kernel.