[NobodyNada]

The discussion is about a project for securing legacy code by machine-translating it to Rust. Fil-C is an alternative way to secure legacy code using a different C implementation. I think that's highly relevant to the discussion.

[adastra22]

The kind of errors being protected against are totally different though.

[pizlonator]

Fil-C protects against a superset of the errors that Rust protects against. It just does it dynamically.

And more comprehensively. There’s no `unsafe` statement in Fil-C. There’s no need for it since dynamic checking is vastly more precise.

[adastra22]

Dynamic/runtime checks (and crashes) are VERY different from compile time checks though. Many applications, and especially those that DARPA are focused on, care about ahead-of-time guarantees that code will work correctly, and runtime panic is actually the worst possible failure mode. Think of flight control software, for example.

[pizlonator]

This DARPA doc isn’t about flight software.

Rust uses runtime checking for array access bounds, which are the most common kind of memory safety vulnerability.

[jandrewrogers]

Checking at compile-time is required for some applications and highly desirable regardless.

This is something recent versions of C++ do really well. It is my main reason for using C++ beyond its unparalleled performance in practice.