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0 pointsmightyham4mo ago0 comments

I was also, in fact, referring to the bulk of legacy code bases that can't just be fully rewritten. Almost all good engineering is done incrementally, including the adoption of something like safe_c.h (I can hardly fathom the insanity of trying to migrate a million LOC+ of C to that library in a single go). I'm arguing that engineering effort would be better spent refactoring and rewriting the application in a fully safe language one small piece at a time.

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kstrauser4mo ago

I’m not sure I agree with that, especially if there were easy wins that could make the world less fragile with a much smaller intermediate effort, eg with something like FilC.

I wholeheartedly agree that a future of not-C is a much better long term goal than one of improved-C.

uecker4mo ago

I don't really agree, at least if the future looks like Rust. I much prefer C and I think an improved C can be memory safe even without GC.

whytevuhuni4mo 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?

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