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0 pointsrahkiin8mo ago0 comments

It would be an interesting excercise just to see how such a language would look.

Would modules be needed or can preprocessing work still. How more advanced will the type system need to be. And how will pointers chanhe to fix all footguns and allow static borrow checking.

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lelanthran8mo ago

> It would be an interesting excercise just to see how such a language would look.

I started designing one (C-with-borrow-checker) way back in 2018; never got around to finishing the design or making a MVP, but I believe you can solve maybe 90% of memory problems (use after free/double free, data racing, leaking, etc) with nothing more than some additional syntax[1] to type declarations and support for only fat arrays.

IIRC, I thought that the above (coupled with an escape hatch for self-referential and/or unsafe values) was all that was needed to prevent 90% of memory errors.

Somewhere along the way scope-creep (objects would be nice, can't leave out generics, operator overloads necessary for expressing vector math, etc) turned what would have been a small project into a very large one.

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[1] By additional syntax, I mean using `&` and `&&` in type declarations as a qualifier similar to how `static`, `const`, `volatile`, etc qualifiers are used.

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