Ha, looking through the links dang added, I came upon something I wrote back in December
I gave (somewhat arbitrarily) the example that safe Rust is OK with a 64-bit pointer (on a modern PC for example) having the value made by the UTF-8 text "LAUGHING". That's 8 bytes, 8 bytes is 64 bits, it fits perfectly. Of course I point out, unsafe Rust, which is allowed to dereference pointers, must never dereference this LAUGHING pointer, it's not actually pointing at anything, but it is allowed to exist in safe Rust.
Coincidentally, in like February or so this year, a new third-party Rust type "ColdString" was introduced to their reddit by somebody I've never met - I read about it and encouraged its author. ColdString is 64 bits (on modern hardware) because inside it's a pointer, and indeed if the text you wanted to store in a ColdString was "LAUGHING" you do that exactly as I described in the December post - it's just the UTF-8 encoded text, no problem. The clever trick inside ColdString is how it can know when that 64-bit pointer really is actually a pointer for longer strings - yet also allows any 0 to 8 byte UTF-8 text string to just be encoded in the ColdString itself directly.
He claims that all syscalls are safe because they're implemented by his custom libc, but that libc then calls out to the system libc, where the system calls are unsafe. He then claims that this is unlike rust, where making a syscall is unsafe. If you stick to the rust standard library in the same way that fil-c programs stick to the fil-c standard library, then all of your rust "system calls" are safe, too.
Someone in the audience also pointed out that a tool like this could be used to compile rust programs, not just C programs, in which case it's odd to hear Fil-C repeatedly framed as a language in opposition to rust rather than as a tool which might complement it.
Rust doesn't runtime validate that your usage of syscalls is memory safe, while Fil-C does. For example you can call mmap in Fil-C and it is still guaranteed to be memory safe, while in Rust you can easily violate memory safety by calling mmap. This seems like an unambiguous improvement to me. This is as memory safe as it is possible to be on a system with a kernel that is not memory safe.
Adding Fil-C-like runtime checks to Rust is definitely an interesting direction.
> For example you can call mmap in Fil-C and it is still guaranteed to be memory safe, while in Rust you can easily violate memory safety by calling mmap.
That's the thing, though. Your Fil-C code isn't calling mmap, it's calling the Fil-C wrapper for mmap. In neither Fil-C nor Rust('s safe subset) can you call the actual system mmap.
Fil-C has access to a memory safe API called mmap with a lot of the capabilities of the mmap system call, while Rust's safe subset does not. Rust allows you to use the mmap system call unsafely, while Fil-C does not. I feel these are both big advantages for Fil-C. You'll never have to audit a Fil-C codebase to determine whether its calls to mmap are memory safe, or indeed any other calls to any API or dependency, even those written in C.
How is Fil-C’s wrapper approach different from someone (not necessarily the Rust stdlib) implementing a safe wrapper around a particular syscall?
mmap is a bit of an outlier because it is not possible to implement a fully featured safe wrapper (MAP_SHARED) in Rust. So I would be curious to see what safety guarantees Fil-C claims to provide for mmap.
Rust is less safe because it has a feature for turning off safety, called `unsafe`. Fil-C does not have a way to turn off safety, and it enforces safety checks at runtime. That's the reasoning anyways. If you define another language Rust-Without-Any-Unsafe, then maybe that one is safer than Fil-C.
> If you define another language Rust-Without-Any-Unsafe, then maybe that one is safer than Fil-C.
Just write `#![forbid(unsafe_code)]` at the top of your src/lib.rs, and track crates not using it with `cargo geiger`. You don't need a whole new language, it already provides the tools to wield that hatch shut.
> Rust is less safe because it has a feature for turning off safety
Can I write Fil-C's mmap wrapper in Fil-C?
If no, fair enough, but it's worth noting I can write a safe Rust mmap wrapper in Rust, and I absolutely and frequently need to do that kind of "syscall wrapping" in arenas Fil-C explicitly hasn't handled, by virtue of being explicitly a Linux project.
If yes, that sounds like an escape hatch to Fil-C's memory safety, undermining the claim that Fil-C is fundamentally safer, and you're now at best arguing it's safer as tends to be used.
But the runtime cost of Fil-C means that - in most cases - your actual production application will be compiled with a standard C compiler. This applies not just to your code, but to all dependencies (due to ABI).
So I don’t see how Rust is at a huge disadvantage here when Fil-C is typically not going to be enforcing safety in production. I suppose the testing/fuzzing story becomes all the more important because you need to exercise runtime behavior for Fil-C to detect unsafe faults.
Don’t get me wrong: I think Fil-C is a smart idea and an excellent way to introduce memory safety to existing C codebases. But I don’t get this whole (usually implied) idea that Fil-C somehow makes Rust look bad or renders it obsolete.
I think it's not so much that Fil-C renders Rust completely useless, but rather it reduces the supposed validity and wild arguments to frivolously rewrite anything and everything in Rust.
The whole point of Fil-C is that it is fast enough to consider using in production for some applications while still guaranteeing memory safety. We already have ASAN and Valgrind and other tools for development purposes, that's not what Fil-C is targeting.
So Fil-C is competing with Go, C#, typescript and Python. If I’m writing a greenfield project where “bare metal” performance isn’t needed, why would anyone choose Fil-C over a more mature GC language?
C is more verbose and more error prone than Go and C#. It has worse tooling. It’s missing decades of language features. C isn’t properly cross platform. There’s no package manager. The “standard library” isn’t fully standard. It’s full of sharp edges and bad decisions.
I can imagine using Fil-C to run legacy code. But for new projects, it just seems worse in every way compared to Go, C#, typescript and friends. It’s worse, slow, and inconvenient.
Of the group of languages presented, your argument has more merit for Go. With C# and others, there is an additional OOP argument in there, that splits into different factions.
But what is being overlooked, is the massive numerical dominance of C programmers and projects, along with legacy and embedded code. There is going to be a preference for writing and using C, that could arguably fuel Fil-C for a very long time.
I am assuming that Fil-C introduces orders of magnitude less overhead than ASAN or Valgrind.
Also, it’s probably fast enough for apps to be deployed in something like a staging environment for integration tests to run against them. Production deploy/release can then happen using a tagged version that gets compiled using vanilla GCC/Clang.
I'm not sure about the speed of ASAN, it may be comparable but doesn't guarantee memory safety. It's only for catching mistakes and not secure against an adversary. Valgrind is dramatically slower.
Adding Fil-C-like runtime checks to Rust is definitely an interesting direction. As I mentioned upthread. It's not just the availability of the safe API that's interesting, though, but also the prohibition on using the unsafe API in the entire program and all dependencies. Which Rust could also do in theory but not yet in practice AFAIK.
Complete memory safety (much less concurrent garbage collection) isn’t really workable for things like kernel and some embedded programming contexts. Rust can work in those contexts precisely because it has an unsafe out.
Even so Fil-C fails at being 100% compatible for userspace due to the silly things people do with pointers. Hence the large amount of effort he’s had to do to fix up that 0.1% of userspace that breaks.
It doesn't work for a significant set of syscalls and is very very unlikely to ever work because of how the syscalls themselves work unless ofc you are willing to emulate them somehow which is a insane amount of additional compute cost.
Better include Rowhammer too. Maybe Fil-C should run a test and refuse to start on any system with bad RAM or unpatched CPU errata. It could also monitor the voltage to protect against undervolting attacks. And you'll need some cosmic ray shielding too.
Of course I'm kidding, but it is absolutely the case that if you truly care about safety you need to consider more than the program source code and binary, but also the environment, including kernel and hardware. The user doesn't care if their web browser got hacked via stack buffer underflow or /dev/exynos-mem or Rowhammer; the result is the same.
Fully agreed. At some point you have to draw a line and say that the rest is the responsibility of the kernel and hardware and user, and I think Fil-C drew that line in the right place.
“Custom” and “system” aren’t the terms I use; I say user libc and you libc (because they are basically the same libc - either both are musl or both are glibc).
User libc calls to the Fil-C runtime, which filters syscalls, and those filtered syscalls are made via yolo libc.
Hence, a Fil-C program is memory safe down to the syscalls and syscalls cannot be used to escape the protections (unless you do weird stuff with /proc)
The way I see it, as far as memory safety is concerned that's just framing. Both Fil-C and Rust have a boundary below which the unsafe lives. If Fil-C is only safer than rust when you don't pass the `-F unsafe_code` argument to rustc then IMO "safer" in this case is somewhat of an empty claim.
I think you should watch the linked presentation, it will show how it is "safer" than rust. Unfortunately there are performance implications, but fil-c seems fast enough to go into production for many workloads and surprisingly needs very little code changes to existing C/C++ projects which is a huge benefit.
I think Fil-C might make a lot of sense for running legacy C or C++ codebases. But for new code, it seems like it’s trying to compete with other GC languages. Take away C’s performance advantages and I don’t know why anyone would use it.
Fil-C: Combining the ergonomics of C with the performance of Python!
the only reason to use cython (in my experience) is to write quick numpy extensions without a tonne of extra baggage from having a complete compiled extension in C/C++/Rust. Often, you explicitly want to avoid the compiler offering you any kinds of additional checking because you want to get maximum throughput. Most of the functions I’ve written in cython explicitly opt out of bounds checking etc since the memory access is sequential and bounded by construction and very obvious when you mess things up by writing simple unit tests. Given that, it doesn’t seem useful to me to add any kind of memory safety as additional overhead. YMMV I mostly do scientific computing and signal processing.
> Someone in the audience also pointed out that a tool like this could be used to compile rust programs, not just C programs, in which case it's odd to hear Fil-C repeatedly framed as a language in opposition to rust rather than as a tool which might complement it.
You can combine both approaches for sure, but that doesn't change that they are indeed separate approaches. One (Rust) intends to characterize and prevent undefined behavior at compile time, and another (Fil-C) intends to make undefined behavior impossible at runtime, as evidenced by decisions like (for example) making unsafe usage of setjmp/longjmp safe.
You could sort of achieve "safety-in-depth" by combining both approaches, but Rust prefers to prevent all undefined behavior statically, and Fil-C prefers to focus on dynamic approaches. They have real differences, so that's probably what comes off as "oppositional"
This presentation wasn’t too bad in terms of us vs theming, but in general throughout the lifetime of the project there’s been a strong us vs them rhetoric. I think it’s working as a marketing tactic to some extent but there are better, albeit harder ways to market the thing.
Rust generally invites us vs them everywhere because it's just so ambitious and attractive (to some). Fil-C probably receives questions all the time about why they don't just do X or Y that Rust does. Maybe they end up supporting their position against that type of pressure and it looks like they're opposing Rust when all they're doing is justifying themselves.
How would Rust perform static checks on dynamic bounds? That seems like an impossible order, i.e. not a reasonable evaluation criteria for any (general-purpose) language.
(I'm separately skeptical that it's the most important memory safety property; I suspect that a review of Chrome and Firefox 0days would show that UAFs and type confusion are, at least to attackers, equally if not more important.)
ATS could probably do some of this by constructing proofs about the bounds and indices - not in the completely general case of course, but for at least some fraction of what a language without dependent types would have to defer to runtime
All "dynamic" means is that you don't know or don't prove the precise value statically. However you may know the range of possible values, or you may know properties of your algorithm that mean it can never attempt an out-of-bounds access. Sometimes you don't know any of these things, but sometimes you do.
What I was (badly) trying to express was more that given static bounds rust could also eliminate dynamic checks. So saying e.g. ATS can eliminate static checks, is kind of switching the target.
Rust can not do this. But the original claim is that it is all statically checked in Rust, and this is an obvious counter example. Some dependently types languages can prove this statically, also model checking can do this, etc. So it can be done statically as well, but not in Rust.
> But the original claim is that it is all statically checked in Rust
Where? The GP's comment says "prefers," which I didn't read to mean a blanket statement. I don't think anybody with more than passing experience in Rust (or C) would make such a claim.
> Some dependently types languages can prove this statically, also model checking can do this, etc. So it can be done statically as well, but not in Rust.
You're couching the part where it can't be done with full generality or can be done with full generality, but with punishing semantics. The appropriate comparison here is with other normal general purpose compiled languages.
I read "Rust prefers to prevent all undefined behavior statically," to also imply that it actually does this, because otherwise the word "all" would not make sense to me in this sentence.
Dependently types languages and model checking do exist. They come with tradeoffs, but this is also true for Rust.
Presumably, they're talking about the possibility of explicitly replacing dynamic bounds checks in cases where it's statically provable that the access will not overrun. That doesn't necessarily mean you lose cases where you genuinely can't prove such a thing, but rather that it would be possible to opt into compiler assistance with proving it, rather than hoping LLVM will have your back. At least, that's how I'd envision such a thing for Rust. This would be similar to how you can already choose whether to invite more of the borrow checker by using references directly, or to do the checks at runtime with Rc/RefCell, etc.
Yeah, that seems like a nice thing that Rust could offer. It strikes me as a weird thing to get hung up on, though, given that the norm in compiled languages - including C - is to express your bounds such that an optimizing compiler can (but won't necessarily) eliminate them.
(You mentioned WUFFS below, which is why I qualified with general-purpose! One thing that WUFFS does that I think Rust could add pretty easily is provable indexing, e.g. allow me to use a `u8` to index a `[u8; 256]` without having to widen to a `usize` first and hope that LLVM optimizes it back out.)
My thought here is to proactively verify that LLVM elided the automatic bounds checks in places where you believe that your explicit checks should be sufficient.
I merely pointed out that the statement "Rust prefers to prevent all undefined behavior statically" is misleading in the sense that Rust does not do this for all undefined behavior.
Maybe if you think of [] as offsetting a pointer rather than calling into an Index (or IndexMut) implementation. Since the return type isn't optional, a panic is the only way to avoid performing an invalid access or manufacturing an unfaithful return value. There are also optional accessors which do not panic, and unsafe/unchecked accessors.
This isn't entirely true. Rust's indexing operator performs a dynamic check but the language and stdlib have a number of ways to access array elements without indexing, which is effectively a form of static checking. For example, the following loop is statically guaranteed to not go OOB, and will not emit any unnecessary bounds checks:
for i in some_arr {
println!("{i}");
}
I suspect most techniques you could think of to statically avoid bounds checks are possible in rust's type system.
Yes, rust didn't invent the concept of an iterator, and is thus not the only language which offers a solution to statically avoid bounds checks. Feel free to give a more "interesting" case you believe rust wouldn't be able to handle.
Now it's your example that's too simple. I can't present a counter-example that wouldn't look totally different: if you avoid the indexing operator then trivially incorrect code like that becomes unrepresentable. It's like if I said destructors help you avoid memory leaks and you asked how you'd avoid a leak in a single-function program that does nothing but call `Box::leak()`.
Again: I'm not disputing the fact that the rust index operator does a dynamic bounds check.
However, a vector's length is inherently a runtime concept, and is a user-defined library type, so the compiler does not attempt to directly reason about this at compile time. However, for this example, post-optimizations, it doesn't do a runtime check at all: it calls the panic directly, because the optimizer does in fact reason that this always panics and removes the dynamic check.
It is true that Rust inserts dynamic checks for things that it can't prove statically, but so do dependently typed languages. "Please read an integer from stdin and then load that element of an array" is not possible to statically check, it must rely on runtime checks, definitionally.
Rust does prefer static checks. It uses static analysis to prevent many types of bugs - including use-after-free and data races. But you’re right; rust still falls back to runtime checks when static analysis is too hard. Like dynamic bounds checking and integer overflow (in debug mode). Cell, Refcell and friends also have a (small) runtime cost. Rust prefers static analysis but does not use it exclusively.
Let’s say rust is 80% static analysis, 20% dynamic checks. Fil-C seems to go the other way and have 80+% dynamic checks. It’s an interesting point.
Nobody disagrees with you that rust sometimes inserts dynamic bounds checks. But “prefer” in this context means “most of the time, when possible” not “all of the time”. I prefer vanilla ice cream over chocolate. But I still eat chocolate ice cream when vanilla isn’t available. Pointing out that one time I ate chocolate ice cream isn’t a gotcha moment.
It's because you're not using words in the way that people use them when talking about this stuff.
Rust (outside of the unsafe superset) has no undefined behavior. That is guaranteed, statically, at compile time: all execution paths have well-defined behaviors. That does not mean that there are no runtime consequences whatsoever. For example, the behavior of an invalid index is a panic, at runtime. Inserting a check for an invalid index at compile time is static enforcement of the behavior, even if the check itself happens at runtime.
If you had said "sometimes, Rust can't eliminate dynamic checks because it doesn't have a strong enough reasoning about some compile time properties" nobody would be arguing with you about this. Your example is one where a language with stronger reasoning would be able to detect it, for sure. Lean can do this, for example.
It's possible to do this (WUFFS does it) but it's so invasive that, well, you basically end up with WUFFS. You end up having to track every set of possible and impossible values at every location, etc. (during each program location too.) WUFFS certainly has its place and I've kind of been itching to try it out myself, but I think getting to the point where dynamic arrays can be statically bounds-checked would have highly disabled Rust.
This is sort of already possible in Rust when you use safe primitives (e.g., RefCell), but it doesn't cover unsafe code invoking Undefined Behavior. Placing something like Fil-C around unsafe code could prove to be interesting, especially since current approaches rely on interpretation (Miri, Soteria Rust) rather than translation.
Every one of these posts is the same. There's this weird blindness to the problems and imperfections in Fil-C --- just shouting down. It reduces my confidence in Fil-C as a whole.
Rust, for all its faults, at least engages with its critics. I've long faulted Rust's use of Result over exceptions, for example, but the maintainers at least acknowledge that other options exist and each has trade-offs. Not Pizlo and his fans.
To be clear, I like Fil-C. It's a practical implementation of something that should have existed a long time ago. And Pizlo is, in fact, a great programmer. It just rubs me the wrong way that he can't be content with having done excellent work --- he has to claim things that his system doesn't provide (like memory safety under data races --- minor fault, but still) and claim that other systems are worse in ways they are not (e.g. with respect to Rust having unsafe blocks).
Is genuine excellence not enough? Why must he persist in claiming a false perfection?
> claim that other systems are worse in ways they are not (e.g. with respect to Rust having unsafe blocks)
If considering only "safety", then Fil-C is more safe than any Rust containing unsafe blocks, no? With the usual caveats about whether an abort() is safe.
Machine code is unsafe, so any memory-safe language must necessarily be built on some unsafe code somewhere. Safety is always conditional on the underlying unsafe implementation having no bugs.
With Fil-C, the "unsafe blocks" live entirely within the compiler and runtime. With Rust, the unsafe foundation is the Rust compiler and standard library, as well as any unsafe code within your application or dependencies.
So either way you're in the same situation of relying on the correctness of the unsafe code you depend on. But there are two major differences:
- Unsafe code can be written in Rust, instead of inside the compiler. This is much easier to write and to review for correctness.
- People other than Fil are allowed to write unsafe Rust. This is what Fil's point is about, and yes, it allows you to opt-in to increasing your attack surface by trusting unsafe code written by yourself or your dependents. Rust allows the user to choose where they draw the trust boundary, and Fil-C does not.
It's true that Fil is probably better than I am at writing unsafe code. So "Fil-C is safer than Rust" is true in that sense. But Fil-C is certainly not safer than safe Rust. And sure, you can't run all the Rust code in the world if you compile with '--deny unsafe_code'; but Fil-C can't run all the C code in the world either. Unsafe Rust is rarely needed, mostly only if you want to do pointer crimes or FFI, and Fil-C doesn't support a lot of (perfectly legal) pointer crimes and FFI either.
There are no 'unsafe' blocks in Fil-C. I think you trying to conflate 'unsafe blocks' with the fact that there might be compiler errors which might break 'safety'? Which is equally true in any system including Rust.
If you think you like Fil-C but aren’t able to see the specific way in which it’s better than Rust (more comprehensive safety), then what is it that you’re liking?
Not the parent, but: I strongly dislike this framing of "Fil-C is better than Rust" or "Rust is better than Fil-C". This is apples-to-oranges; users will almost never be comparison-shopping between the two because they address almost entirely different problems.
There are roughly two categories of Rust user:
1. People who are using Rust for application development. Most of these users write zero unsafe blocks in their careers. For these users, "memory safety" was probably not a strong reason to pick Rust, because there are a wealth of other memory-safe application development languages out there.
2. People who are using Rust for systems programming (i.e. programming under resource or environment constraints). These users may write unsafe for performance reasons, or to do things like hardware MMIO; and they're using Rust over C/C++ either for security or just because the tooling is nicer.
The first category of user is unlikely to consider C for application development in this decade; they're going to be comparing Rust against Go or Java or Node.js. Fil-C solves the security problem of memory safety, but it does not free the developer from the difficulty of having to manually write memory-safe C code; their program will just crash if they get it wrong.
The second category of user cannot use Fil-C because of its performance overhead, runtime requirements and/or lack of escape hatches for MMIO/FFI.
Where Fil-C does shine is for legacy application software written in C. Here, it's a free lunch: a way to harden the massive amount of existing software without an expensive rewrite. I would love to see distros shipping pizlonated coreutils, ffmpeg, systemd, curl, sudo, postgres, etc., anything that has a big attack surface, but does not need to be memory-unsafe.
This is a problem I care about a lot, and your work here is truly a monumental advancement in the field. Comparisons to Rust sell it short by inviting endless debate on problems largely tangential to Fil-C.
I’ve never said that Fil-C is better than Rust full stop.
I have articulated the specific ways that Fil-C is better.
And I’ve articulated the specific ways that Rust is better. You’ve enumerated some of those reasons from your perspective, though I disagree on the details.
I like those kinds of conversations. We shouldn’t shy away from them as a community. They help us grow a shared understanding of the tech
Not the person you're asking, but result types pessimize code more, add register pressure, use more icache for largely dead code, etc. They're arguably noisier at the source level too.
That said, I've spent too much of my life chasing implicit control flow to accept exceptions. Heck, C++'s "noexcept" is a strong argument against exceptions all by itself.
The worst part about rust not having exceptions is that it actually does have exceptions, you just shouldn't use them. All the downsides and none of the benefits:
Ha, looking through the links dang added, I came upon something I wrote back in December
I gave (somewhat arbitrarily) the example that safe Rust is OK with a 64-bit pointer (on a modern PC for example) having the value made by the UTF-8 text "LAUGHING". That's 8 bytes, 8 bytes is 64 bits, it fits perfectly. Of course I point out, unsafe Rust, which is allowed to dereference pointers, must never dereference this LAUGHING pointer, it's not actually pointing at anything, but it is allowed to exist in safe Rust.
Coincidentally, in like February or so this year, a new third-party Rust type "ColdString" was introduced to their reddit by somebody I've never met - I read about it and encouraged its author. ColdString is 64 bits (on modern hardware) because inside it's a pointer, and indeed if the text you wanted to store in a ColdString was "LAUGHING" you do that exactly as I described in the December post - it's just the UTF-8 encoded text, no problem. The clever trick inside ColdString is how it can know when that 64-bit pointer really is actually a pointer for longer strings - yet also allows any 0 to 8 byte UTF-8 text string to just be encoded in the ColdString itself directly.
There are getting to be quite a lot of these so I'll do it CPS style:
Memory Safe Context Switching - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48727177 - June 2026 (30 comments)
Memory Safe Inline Assembly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606096 - June 2026 (47 comments)
The Fil-C Optimized Calling Convention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48162876 - May 2026 (32 comments)
A simplified model of Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47810872 - April 2026 (136 comments)
Pizlix: Memory Safe Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260852 - Dec 2025 (30 comments)
Linux Sandboxes and Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259064 - Dec 2025 (156 comments)
Ported freetype, fontconfig, harfbuzz, and graphite to Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090009 - Nov 2025 (56 comments)
A Note on Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45842494 - Nov 2025 (210 comments)
Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45842242 - Nov 2025 (1 comment)
Notes by djb on using Fil-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45788040 - Nov 2025 (246 comments)
for more, goto https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45792588
He claims that all syscalls are safe because they're implemented by his custom libc, but that libc then calls out to the system libc, where the system calls are unsafe. He then claims that this is unlike rust, where making a syscall is unsafe. If you stick to the rust standard library in the same way that fil-c programs stick to the fil-c standard library, then all of your rust "system calls" are safe, too.
Someone in the audience also pointed out that a tool like this could be used to compile rust programs, not just C programs, in which case it's odd to hear Fil-C repeatedly framed as a language in opposition to rust rather than as a tool which might complement it.
Rust doesn't runtime validate that your usage of syscalls is memory safe, while Fil-C does. For example you can call mmap in Fil-C and it is still guaranteed to be memory safe, while in Rust you can easily violate memory safety by calling mmap. This seems like an unambiguous improvement to me. This is as memory safe as it is possible to be on a system with a kernel that is not memory safe.
Adding Fil-C-like runtime checks to Rust is definitely an interesting direction.
> For example you can call mmap in Fil-C and it is still guaranteed to be memory safe, while in Rust you can easily violate memory safety by calling mmap.
That's the thing, though. Your Fil-C code isn't calling mmap, it's calling the Fil-C wrapper for mmap. In neither Fil-C nor Rust('s safe subset) can you call the actual system mmap.
Fil-C has access to a memory safe API called mmap with a lot of the capabilities of the mmap system call, while Rust's safe subset does not. Rust allows you to use the mmap system call unsafely, while Fil-C does not. I feel these are both big advantages for Fil-C. You'll never have to audit a Fil-C codebase to determine whether its calls to mmap are memory safe, or indeed any other calls to any API or dependency, even those written in C.
How is Fil-C’s wrapper approach different from someone (not necessarily the Rust stdlib) implementing a safe wrapper around a particular syscall?
mmap is a bit of an outlier because it is not possible to implement a fully featured safe wrapper (MAP_SHARED) in Rust. So I would be curious to see what safety guarantees Fil-C claims to provide for mmap.
> from someone (not necessarily the Rust stdlib) implementing a safe wrapper around a particular syscall?
You might call that library "nix"[1]. Many, though not all, of the bindings are safe wrappers around the underlying unsafe syscall.
(The specific call of mmap from upthread, though, that one is not. I'm not sure how you would make such a call safe.)
[1]: https://docs.rs/nix/latest/nix/index.html
Rust is less safe because it has a feature for turning off safety, called `unsafe`. Fil-C does not have a way to turn off safety, and it enforces safety checks at runtime. That's the reasoning anyways. If you define another language Rust-Without-Any-Unsafe, then maybe that one is safer than Fil-C.
> If you define another language Rust-Without-Any-Unsafe, then maybe that one is safer than Fil-C.
Just write `#![forbid(unsafe_code)]` at the top of your src/lib.rs, and track crates not using it with `cargo geiger`. You don't need a whole new language, it already provides the tools to wield that hatch shut.
> Rust is less safe because it has a feature for turning off safety
Can I write Fil-C's mmap wrapper in Fil-C?
If no, fair enough, but it's worth noting I can write a safe Rust mmap wrapper in Rust, and I absolutely and frequently need to do that kind of "syscall wrapping" in arenas Fil-C explicitly hasn't handled, by virtue of being explicitly a Linux project.
If yes, that sounds like an escape hatch to Fil-C's memory safety, undermining the claim that Fil-C is fundamentally safer, and you're now at best arguing it's safer as tends to be used.
But the runtime cost of Fil-C means that - in most cases - your actual production application will be compiled with a standard C compiler. This applies not just to your code, but to all dependencies (due to ABI).
So I don’t see how Rust is at a huge disadvantage here when Fil-C is typically not going to be enforcing safety in production. I suppose the testing/fuzzing story becomes all the more important because you need to exercise runtime behavior for Fil-C to detect unsafe faults.
Don’t get me wrong: I think Fil-C is a smart idea and an excellent way to introduce memory safety to existing C codebases. But I don’t get this whole (usually implied) idea that Fil-C somehow makes Rust look bad or renders it obsolete.
I think it's not so much that Fil-C renders Rust completely useless, but rather it reduces the supposed validity and wild arguments to frivolously rewrite anything and everything in Rust.
The whole point of Fil-C is that it is fast enough to consider using in production for some applications while still guaranteeing memory safety. We already have ASAN and Valgrind and other tools for development purposes, that's not what Fil-C is targeting.
So Fil-C is competing with Go, C#, typescript and Python. If I’m writing a greenfield project where “bare metal” performance isn’t needed, why would anyone choose Fil-C over a more mature GC language?
C is more verbose and more error prone than Go and C#. It has worse tooling. It’s missing decades of language features. C isn’t properly cross platform. There’s no package manager. The “standard library” isn’t fully standard. It’s full of sharp edges and bad decisions.
I can imagine using Fil-C to run legacy code. But for new projects, it just seems worse in every way compared to Go, C#, typescript and friends. It’s worse, slow, and inconvenient.
Of the group of languages presented, your argument has more merit for Go. With C# and others, there is an additional OOP argument in there, that splits into different factions.
But what is being overlooked, is the massive numerical dominance of C programmers and projects, along with legacy and embedded code. There is going to be a preference for writing and using C, that could arguably fuel Fil-C for a very long time.
I am assuming that Fil-C introduces orders of magnitude less overhead than ASAN or Valgrind.
Also, it’s probably fast enough for apps to be deployed in something like a staging environment for integration tests to run against them. Production deploy/release can then happen using a tagged version that gets compiled using vanilla GCC/Clang.
I'm not sure about the speed of ASAN, it may be comparable but doesn't guarantee memory safety. It's only for catching mistakes and not secure against an adversary. Valgrind is dramatically slower.
Adding Fil-C-like runtime checks to Rust is definitely an interesting direction. As I mentioned upthread. It's not just the availability of the safe API that's interesting, though, but also the prohibition on using the unsafe API in the entire program and all dependencies. Which Rust could also do in theory but not yet in practice AFAIK.
Complete memory safety (much less concurrent garbage collection) isn’t really workable for things like kernel and some embedded programming contexts. Rust can work in those contexts precisely because it has an unsafe out.
Even so Fil-C fails at being 100% compatible for userspace due to the silly things people do with pointers. Hence the large amount of effort he’s had to do to fix up that 0.1% of userspace that breaks.
It doesn't work for a significant set of syscalls and is very very unlikely to ever work because of how the syscalls themselves work unless ofc you are willing to emulate them somehow which is a insane amount of additional compute cost.
Okay, let me know when I can call process_vm_writev or ptrace and have Fil-C verify safety properties on the result.
Don't forget reads and writes of /proc/self/mem! :-)
Better include Rowhammer too. Maybe Fil-C should run a test and refuse to start on any system with bad RAM or unpatched CPU errata. It could also monitor the voltage to protect against undervolting attacks. And you'll need some cosmic ray shielding too.
Of course I'm kidding, but it is absolutely the case that if you truly care about safety you need to consider more than the program source code and binary, but also the environment, including kernel and hardware. The user doesn't care if their web browser got hacked via stack buffer underflow or /dev/exynos-mem or Rowhammer; the result is the same.
Sure all of those are escape hatches that work against any memory safety tech.
Point is, Fil-C goes further than any other memory safety tech in terms of what it guards
How does it compare to the equivalent code in Typescript, Go or C#? Those languages all have “safe” syscall wrappers too, for a subset of syscalls.
Those languages rely on a much larger pile of YOLO C/C++ code for their runtimes and standard libraries than Fil-C does.
So Fil-C is safer than those
Fully agreed. At some point you have to draw a line and say that the rest is the responsibility of the kernel and hardware and user, and I think Fil-C drew that line in the right place.
Custom libc does not call to system libc.
“Custom” and “system” aren’t the terms I use; I say user libc and you libc (because they are basically the same libc - either both are musl or both are glibc).
User libc calls to the Fil-C runtime, which filters syscalls, and those filtered syscalls are made via yolo libc.
Hence, a Fil-C program is memory safe down to the syscalls and syscalls cannot be used to escape the protections (unless you do weird stuff with /proc)
The way I see it, as far as memory safety is concerned that's just framing. Both Fil-C and Rust have a boundary below which the unsafe lives. If Fil-C is only safer than rust when you don't pass the `-F unsafe_code` argument to rustc then IMO "safer" in this case is somewhat of an empty claim.
I think you should watch the linked presentation, it will show how it is "safer" than rust. Unfortunately there are performance implications, but fil-c seems fast enough to go into production for many workloads and surprisingly needs very little code changes to existing C/C++ projects which is a huge benefit.
I think Fil-C might make a lot of sense for running legacy C or C++ codebases. But for new code, it seems like it’s trying to compete with other GC languages. Take away C’s performance advantages and I don’t know why anyone would use it.
Fil-C: Combining the ergonomics of C with the performance of Python!
indeed, the ideas could be used more widely.
fil-c runs on linux.
what if linux ran on fil-c?
Do you want your kernel to be 2x slower and use 4x as much memory?
I was under the impression that fil-c's memory management (gc?) wouldn't work on a kernel? Be sweet if you could, ofc
what if fil-c could draw pelicans?
also: why not use fil-c to improve cython, and the ffi.
If you want a slow, garbage collected language in the Python ecosystem, why not just write Python?
the only reason to use cython (in my experience) is to write quick numpy extensions without a tonne of extra baggage from having a complete compiled extension in C/C++/Rust. Often, you explicitly want to avoid the compiler offering you any kinds of additional checking because you want to get maximum throughput. Most of the functions I’ve written in cython explicitly opt out of bounds checking etc since the memory access is sequential and bounded by construction and very obvious when you mess things up by writing simple unit tests. Given that, it doesn’t seem useful to me to add any kind of memory safety as additional overhead. YMMV I mostly do scientific computing and signal processing.
> Someone in the audience also pointed out that a tool like this could be used to compile rust programs, not just C programs, in which case it's odd to hear Fil-C repeatedly framed as a language in opposition to rust rather than as a tool which might complement it.
You can combine both approaches for sure, but that doesn't change that they are indeed separate approaches. One (Rust) intends to characterize and prevent undefined behavior at compile time, and another (Fil-C) intends to make undefined behavior impossible at runtime, as evidenced by decisions like (for example) making unsafe usage of setjmp/longjmp safe.
You could sort of achieve "safety-in-depth" by combining both approaches, but Rust prefers to prevent all undefined behavior statically, and Fil-C prefers to focus on dynamic approaches. They have real differences, so that's probably what comes off as "oppositional"
This presentation wasn’t too bad in terms of us vs theming, but in general throughout the lifetime of the project there’s been a strong us vs them rhetoric. I think it’s working as a marketing tactic to some extent but there are better, albeit harder ways to market the thing.
Rust generally invites us vs them everywhere because it's just so ambitious and attractive (to some). Fil-C probably receives questions all the time about why they don't just do X or Y that Rust does. Maybe they end up supporting their position against that type of pressure and it looks like they're opposing Rust when all they're doing is justifying themselves.
Arguably the most important memory safety property, i.e. bounds checking for dynamic arrays, is also not statically checked in Rust.
How would Rust perform static checks on dynamic bounds? That seems like an impossible order, i.e. not a reasonable evaluation criteria for any (general-purpose) language.
(I'm separately skeptical that it's the most important memory safety property; I suspect that a review of Chrome and Firefox 0days would show that UAFs and type confusion are, at least to attackers, equally if not more important.)
ATS could probably do some of this by constructing proofs about the bounds and indices - not in the completely general case of course, but for at least some fraction of what a language without dependent types would have to defer to runtime
those are not dynamic bounds.
All "dynamic" means is that you don't know or don't prove the precise value statically. However you may know the range of possible values, or you may know properties of your algorithm that mean it can never attempt an out-of-bounds access. Sometimes you don't know any of these things, but sometimes you do.
What I was (badly) trying to express was more that given static bounds rust could also eliminate dynamic checks. So saying e.g. ATS can eliminate static checks, is kind of switching the target.
https://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/DOCUMENT/INT2PROGINATS/HTML... is the kind of thing I mean - ATS programs can include proofs that an array access will be safely within bounds, even if we don't have an exact literal subscript in the code.
Rust can not do this. But the original claim is that it is all statically checked in Rust, and this is an obvious counter example. Some dependently types languages can prove this statically, also model checking can do this, etc. So it can be done statically as well, but not in Rust.
> But the original claim is that it is all statically checked in Rust
Where? The GP's comment says "prefers," which I didn't read to mean a blanket statement. I don't think anybody with more than passing experience in Rust (or C) would make such a claim.
> Some dependently types languages can prove this statically, also model checking can do this, etc. So it can be done statically as well, but not in Rust.
You're couching the part where it can't be done with full generality or can be done with full generality, but with punishing semantics. The appropriate comparison here is with other normal general purpose compiled languages.
I read "Rust prefers to prevent all undefined behavior statically," to also imply that it actually does this, because otherwise the word "all" would not make sense to me in this sentence.
Dependently types languages and model checking do exist. They come with tradeoffs, but this is also true for Rust.
Presumably, they're talking about the possibility of explicitly replacing dynamic bounds checks in cases where it's statically provable that the access will not overrun. That doesn't necessarily mean you lose cases where you genuinely can't prove such a thing, but rather that it would be possible to opt into compiler assistance with proving it, rather than hoping LLVM will have your back. At least, that's how I'd envision such a thing for Rust. This would be similar to how you can already choose whether to invite more of the borrow checker by using references directly, or to do the checks at runtime with Rc/RefCell, etc.
Yeah, that seems like a nice thing that Rust could offer. It strikes me as a weird thing to get hung up on, though, given that the norm in compiled languages - including C - is to express your bounds such that an optimizing compiler can (but won't necessarily) eliminate them.
(You mentioned WUFFS below, which is why I qualified with general-purpose! One thing that WUFFS does that I think Rust could add pretty easily is provable indexing, e.g. allow me to use a `u8` to index a `[u8; 256]` without having to widen to a `usize` first and hope that LLVM optimizes it back out.)
> rather than hoping LLVM will have your back
My thought here is to proactively verify that LLVM elided the automatic bounds checks in places where you believe that your explicit checks should be sufficient.
That was a key part of my article on "No-Panic Rust": https://blog.reverberate.org/2025/02/03/no-panic-rust.html ("A Dance With The Optimizer")
I merely pointed out that the statement "Rust prefers to prevent all undefined behavior statically" is misleading in the sense that Rust does not do this for all undefined behavior.
Maybe if you think of [] as offsetting a pointer rather than calling into an Index (or IndexMut) implementation. Since the return type isn't optional, a panic is the only way to avoid performing an invalid access or manufacturing an unfaithful return value. There are also optional accessors which do not panic, and unsafe/unchecked accessors.
Maybe? I think my statement is clearly correct in the way I formulated it.
This isn't entirely true. Rust's indexing operator performs a dynamic check but the language and stdlib have a number of ways to access array elements without indexing, which is effectively a form of static checking. For example, the following loop is statically guaranteed to not go OOB, and will not emit any unnecessary bounds checks:
I suspect most techniques you could think of to statically avoid bounds checks are possible in rust's type system.These are not terribly interesting cases though, as it would also be impossible to get an oob access in other languages either.
Yes, rust didn't invent the concept of an iterator, and is thus not the only language which offers a solution to statically avoid bounds checks. Feel free to give a more "interesting" case you believe rust wouldn't be able to handle.
Rust fails to prove basic indirection to be statically safe and instead does a run-time check.
Now it's your example that's too simple. I can't present a counter-example that wouldn't look totally different: if you avoid the indexing operator then trivially incorrect code like that becomes unrepresentable. It's like if I said destructors help you avoid memory leaks and you asked how you'd avoid a leak in a single-function program that does nothing but call `Box::leak()`.
Again: I'm not disputing the fact that the rust index operator does a dynamic bounds check.
If this was an array, that is, a built-in type with a static length, this example does give a compile-time error: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
However, a vector's length is inherently a runtime concept, and is a user-defined library type, so the compiler does not attempt to directly reason about this at compile time. However, for this example, post-optimizations, it doesn't do a runtime check at all: it calls the panic directly, because the optimizer does in fact reason that this always panics and removes the dynamic check.
It is true that Rust inserts dynamic checks for things that it can't prove statically, but so do dependently typed languages. "Please read an integer from stdin and then load that element of an array" is not possible to statically check, it must rely on runtime checks, definitionally.
A: "Rust prefers to prevent all undefined behavior statically"
me: It does dynamic bounds checking.
Rustaceans: But... for XYZ ... it doesn't...
Sigh.
These are all true? I don’t see the problem?
Rust does prefer static checks. It uses static analysis to prevent many types of bugs - including use-after-free and data races. But you’re right; rust still falls back to runtime checks when static analysis is too hard. Like dynamic bounds checking and integer overflow (in debug mode). Cell, Refcell and friends also have a (small) runtime cost. Rust prefers static analysis but does not use it exclusively.
Let’s say rust is 80% static analysis, 20% dynamic checks. Fil-C seems to go the other way and have 80+% dynamic checks. It’s an interesting point.
Nobody disagrees with you that rust sometimes inserts dynamic bounds checks. But “prefer” in this context means “most of the time, when possible” not “all of the time”. I prefer vanilla ice cream over chocolate. But I still eat chocolate ice cream when vanilla isn’t available. Pointing out that one time I ate chocolate ice cream isn’t a gotcha moment.
It's because you're not using words in the way that people use them when talking about this stuff.
Rust (outside of the unsafe superset) has no undefined behavior. That is guaranteed, statically, at compile time: all execution paths have well-defined behaviors. That does not mean that there are no runtime consequences whatsoever. For example, the behavior of an invalid index is a panic, at runtime. Inserting a check for an invalid index at compile time is static enforcement of the behavior, even if the check itself happens at runtime.
If you had said "sometimes, Rust can't eliminate dynamic checks because it doesn't have a strong enough reasoning about some compile time properties" nobody would be arguing with you about this. Your example is one where a language with stronger reasoning would be able to detect it, for sure. Lean can do this, for example.
It's possible to do this (WUFFS does it) but it's so invasive that, well, you basically end up with WUFFS. You end up having to track every set of possible and impossible values at every location, etc. (during each program location too.) WUFFS certainly has its place and I've kind of been itching to try it out myself, but I think getting to the point where dynamic arrays can be statically bounds-checked would have highly disabled Rust.
The combination of static safety gracefully degrading to runtime safety where not provable is interesting to me
This is sort of already possible in Rust when you use safe primitives (e.g., RefCell), but it doesn't cover unsafe code invoking Undefined Behavior. Placing something like Fil-C around unsafe code could prove to be interesting, especially since current approaches rely on interpretation (Miri, Soteria Rust) rather than translation.
Both Rust and Fil-C have unsafe blocks, but in Fil-C latter system, only Pizlo gets to write them. Why am I not filled with confidence?
Fil-C has no unsafe blocks
I was just thinking that we were overdue for a Fil-C post on HN.
Every one of these posts is the same. There's this weird blindness to the problems and imperfections in Fil-C --- just shouting down. It reduces my confidence in Fil-C as a whole.
Rust, for all its faults, at least engages with its critics. I've long faulted Rust's use of Result over exceptions, for example, but the maintainers at least acknowledge that other options exist and each has trade-offs. Not Pizlo and his fans.
To be clear, I like Fil-C. It's a practical implementation of something that should have existed a long time ago. And Pizlo is, in fact, a great programmer. It just rubs me the wrong way that he can't be content with having done excellent work --- he has to claim things that his system doesn't provide (like memory safety under data races --- minor fault, but still) and claim that other systems are worse in ways they are not (e.g. with respect to Rust having unsafe blocks).
Is genuine excellence not enough? Why must he persist in claiming a false perfection?
> claim that other systems are worse in ways they are not (e.g. with respect to Rust having unsafe blocks)
If considering only "safety", then Fil-C is more safe than any Rust containing unsafe blocks, no? With the usual caveats about whether an abort() is safe.
Machine code is unsafe, so any memory-safe language must necessarily be built on some unsafe code somewhere. Safety is always conditional on the underlying unsafe implementation having no bugs.
With Fil-C, the "unsafe blocks" live entirely within the compiler and runtime. With Rust, the unsafe foundation is the Rust compiler and standard library, as well as any unsafe code within your application or dependencies.
So either way you're in the same situation of relying on the correctness of the unsafe code you depend on. But there are two major differences:
- Unsafe code can be written in Rust, instead of inside the compiler. This is much easier to write and to review for correctness.
- People other than Fil are allowed to write unsafe Rust. This is what Fil's point is about, and yes, it allows you to opt-in to increasing your attack surface by trusting unsafe code written by yourself or your dependents. Rust allows the user to choose where they draw the trust boundary, and Fil-C does not.
It's true that Fil is probably better than I am at writing unsafe code. So "Fil-C is safer than Rust" is true in that sense. But Fil-C is certainly not safer than safe Rust. And sure, you can't run all the Rust code in the world if you compile with '--deny unsafe_code'; but Fil-C can't run all the C code in the world either. Unsafe Rust is rarely needed, mostly only if you want to do pointer crimes or FFI, and Fil-C doesn't support a lot of (perfectly legal) pointer crimes and FFI either.
There are no 'unsafe' blocks in Fil-C. I think you trying to conflate 'unsafe blocks' with the fact that there might be compiler errors which might break 'safety'? Which is equally true in any system including Rust.
Exactly, my point is that the compiler and runtime are the "unsafe" portions of Fil-C, and that Fil-C and (safe) Rust are equivalent in this regard.
He's been especially arrogant and dismissive on X. I'm very glad Fil-C exists, but his behavior makes me doubt the whole project.
If you think you like Fil-C but aren’t able to see the specific way in which it’s better than Rust (more comprehensive safety), then what is it that you’re liking?
Not the parent, but: I strongly dislike this framing of "Fil-C is better than Rust" or "Rust is better than Fil-C". This is apples-to-oranges; users will almost never be comparison-shopping between the two because they address almost entirely different problems.
There are roughly two categories of Rust user:
1. People who are using Rust for application development. Most of these users write zero unsafe blocks in their careers. For these users, "memory safety" was probably not a strong reason to pick Rust, because there are a wealth of other memory-safe application development languages out there.
2. People who are using Rust for systems programming (i.e. programming under resource or environment constraints). These users may write unsafe for performance reasons, or to do things like hardware MMIO; and they're using Rust over C/C++ either for security or just because the tooling is nicer.
The first category of user is unlikely to consider C for application development in this decade; they're going to be comparing Rust against Go or Java or Node.js. Fil-C solves the security problem of memory safety, but it does not free the developer from the difficulty of having to manually write memory-safe C code; their program will just crash if they get it wrong.
The second category of user cannot use Fil-C because of its performance overhead, runtime requirements and/or lack of escape hatches for MMIO/FFI.
Where Fil-C does shine is for legacy application software written in C. Here, it's a free lunch: a way to harden the massive amount of existing software without an expensive rewrite. I would love to see distros shipping pizlonated coreutils, ffmpeg, systemd, curl, sudo, postgres, etc., anything that has a big attack surface, but does not need to be memory-unsafe.
This is a problem I care about a lot, and your work here is truly a monumental advancement in the field. Comparisons to Rust sell it short by inviting endless debate on problems largely tangential to Fil-C.
I’ve never said that Fil-C is better than Rust full stop.
I have articulated the specific ways that Fil-C is better.
And I’ve articulated the specific ways that Rust is better. You’ve enumerated some of those reasons from your perspective, though I disagree on the details.
I like those kinds of conversations. We shouldn’t shy away from them as a community. They help us grow a shared understanding of the tech
He claims the system provides memory safety under data races. Does it not?
>I've long faulted Rust's use of Result over exceptions
Why?
Not the person you're asking, but result types pessimize code more, add register pressure, use more icache for largely dead code, etc. They're arguably noisier at the source level too.
That said, I've spent too much of my life chasing implicit control flow to accept exceptions. Heck, C++'s "noexcept" is a strong argument against exceptions all by itself.
The worst part about rust not having exceptions is that it actually does have exceptions, you just shouldn't use them. All the downsides and none of the benefits:
https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2024/05/02/unw...