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- Hacker News
- Related:
Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45735877 - Oct 2025 (130 comments)
Safepoints and Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45258029 - Sept 2025 (44 comments)
Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133938 - Sept 2025 (281 comments)
InvisiCaps: The Fil-C capability model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123672 - Sept 2025 (2 comments)
Just some of the memory safety errors caught by Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215935 - March 2025 (5 comments)
The Fil-C Manifesto: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226587 - Nov 2024 (1 comment)
Rust haters, unite Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42219923 - Nov 2024 (6 comments)
Fil-C a memory-safe version of C and C++ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42158112 - Nov 2024 (1 comment)
Fil-C: Memory-Safe and Compatible C/C++ with No Unsafe Escape Hatches - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936980 - Oct 2024 (4 comments)
The Fil-C Manifesto: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39449500 - Feb 2024 (17 comments)
In addition, here are the major related subthreads from other submissions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45568231 (Oct 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45444224 (Oct 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45235615 (Sept 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45087632 (Aug 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44874034 (Aug 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979112 (May 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43948014 (May 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43353602 (March 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43195623 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43188375 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41899627 (Oct 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41382026 (Aug 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40556083 (June 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39681774 (March 2024)
by dang - Is there a reason that some of the linked benchmarks, if I'm reading it right, have Fil-C running faster than C?[0] I assume it's just due to micro-benchmark variability but I'm curious. Some of them seem impossibly fast compared to C so I wonder if there are some correctness issue there.by fngjdflmdflg
- Can a program be written only partially in Fil-C? That is to say, can we link regular C and Fil+C object files in a single executable?by HexDecOctBin
- For those, like me, that didn’t know what Fil-C is:
> Fil-C is a fanatically compatible memory-safe implementation of C and C++. Lots of software compiles and runs with Fil-C with zero or minimal changes. All memory safety errors are caught as Fil-C panics. Fil-C achieves this using a combination of concurrent garbage collection and invisible capabilities (InvisiCaps). Every possibly-unsafe C and C++ operation is checked. Fil-C has no unsafe statement and only limited FFI to unsafe code.
The posted article has a detailed explanation of djb successfully compiling a bunch of C and C++ codebases.
by testdelacc1 - Cool project! I take it the goal is that, overhead being acceptable, most C / C++ programmes don't actually "have to be" rewritten in something like Rust?
I wonder how / where Epic Games comes in?
by lquidfire - For those who might miss it, the notes cite a new 64-bit version of cdb that supports exabyte databases
Also maybe of interest is that the new cdb subdomain is using pqconnect instead of dnscurve
- > I had originally configured the server phoenix with only 12GB swap. I then had to restart ./build_all_fast_glibc.sh a few times because the Fil-C compilation ran out of memory. Switching to 36GB swap made everything work with no restarts; monitoring showed that almost 19GB swap (plus 12GB RAM) was used at one point. A larger server, 128 cores with 512GB RAM, took 8 minutes for Fil-C plus 6 minutes for musl, with no restarts needed.
Yikes that’s a lot of memory! Filc is doing a lot of static analysis apparently.
by le-mark - To summarize, he's sufficiently impressed with it that he's embarking on an attempt to rebuild an entire Debian system with it, and he's written some software (a GC shim library and build scripts) that are likely to be of interest to others who are attempting the same thing.by kragen