Notes by djb on using Fil-C (2025)

https://cr.yp.to/2025/fil-c.html

100•transpute•5h ago

Comments

Slothrop99•3h ago

Great to see some 3letter guy into this. This might be one of those rando things which gets posted on HN (and which doesn't involve me in the slightest), but a decade later is taking over the world. Rust and Go were like that.

Previously there was that Rust in APT discussion. A lot of this middle-aged linux infrastructure stuff is considered feature-complete and "done". Not many young people are coming in, so you either attract them with "heyy rewrite in rust" or maybe the best thing is to bottle it up and run in a VM.

mesrik•2h ago

>Great to see some 3letter guy into this

AFAIK, djb isn't for many "some 3letter guy" for over about thirty years but perhaps it's just age related issue with those less been around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein

Slothrop99•2h ago

Just to be clear, I mean to venerate Bernstein for earning his 3letters, not to trivialize him.

ggm-at-algebras•2h ago

Not to trivialise but being a 3 letter guy means being old. So, it's at best a celebration of achieving longevity and at worst a celebration of creaky joints and a short temper.

vkazanov•1h ago

Most of us will have a problematic joint or two by a certain age. Almost none of us will be recognised by any name by that time.

ggm-at-algebras•1h ago

Mate, we're not talking about the future, but about 3 letter guys now. I'm one, I've carried it with me for 40+ years as have the ten or twenty peers of mine I know by their tla. I got it at pobox.com when the door opened, the guy at the desk next door got a one letter name. I set up campus email for the entire uni in 1989 and gave myself the tla with my superuser rights before that. I'd done the same at ucl-cs in 85, and before that in Leeds and York.

My point here is we're not famous we're just old enough to have a tla from the time before HR demanded everyone get given.surname.

Every Unix system used to ship with a dmr account. It doesn't mean we all knew Dennis Ritchie, it means the account was in the release tape.

There are 17,000 odd of us. Ekr, Kre and Djb are famous but the other 17,573 of us exist.

Valodim•46m ago

I'm not sure what your point is here. OP was clearly using "three letter guy" in the sense "so famous people know them by their initials". This is hardly unread of, e.g. https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeLetterPerson

debugnik•34m ago

Is this because they're that famous though or simply because there weren't as many people in the scene back then? We just don't do the initials thing anymore.

pixelpoet•42m ago

It's wild how much he looks like ryg, another 3 letter genius

scandox•2h ago

Interesting to see some bash curl being used by a renowned cryptologist...

IshKebab•2h ago

Almost like it's actually fine.

https://medium.com/@ewindisch/curl-bash-a-victimless-crime-d...

uecker•40m ago

It is definitely not fine. The argument seems to be that since you need to trust somebody, curl | bash is fine because you just trust whoever controls the webserver. I think this is missing the point.

jeffrallen•2h ago

Wish we were talking about making Fil-C required for apt, not Rust...

phicoh•1h ago

Those seems to be independent issues. Fil-C is about the best way to compile/run C code.

Rust would be about what language to use for new code.

Now that I have been programming in Rust for a couple of years, I don't want to go back to C (except for some hobby projects).

thomasmg•1h ago

I agree. The main advantage of Fil-C is compatibility with C, in a secure way. The disadvantages are speed, and garbage collection. (Even thought, I read that garbage collection might not be needed in some cases; I would be very interested in knowing more details).

For new code, I would not use Fil-C. For kernel and low-level tools, other languages seem better. Right now, Rust is the only popular language in this space that doesn't have these disadvantages. But in my view, Rust also has issues, specially the borrow checker, and code verbosity. Maybe in the future there will be a language that resolves these issues as well (as a hobby, I'm trying to build such a language). But right now, Rust seems to be the best choice for the kernel (for code that needs to be fast and secure).

testdelacc1•1h ago

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.

https://fil-c.org/

The posted article has a detailed explanation of djb successfully compiling a bunch of C and C++ codebases.

nitinreddy88•33m ago

Building tools is one thing, building a system like Postgres or Databases is going to be another thing.

Anyone really tried building PG or MySQL or such a complex system which heavily relies on IO operations and multi threading capabilities

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