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by jrpelkonen 228 days ago
Fil-C is an innovative approach and a great technical achievement. However, I wouldn't suggest that it is an universal solution without caveats. For instance, the performance penalty of up to 4x is not acceptable in a lot of cases.

Also, the c2rust output is rough but not hopeless: There are real world success stories of rust projects that were bootstrapped via c2rust, e.g. https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/151/translating-bzip2-with-c2r...
2 comments
pizlonator 228 days ago
bzip2 is tiny, has relatively low overhead in Fil-C (forget exactly what it is but not 4x), and last I checked this Rust version still has >100 uses of unsafe.
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galangalalgol 228 days ago
Fil-C doesn't stop the data race problems the borrow checker would catch does it?

Has anyone tried pointing an agentic ai at recreating a c utility by looking only at the man page and using differential fuzzing? It isn't a port, so no licensing issues, and the code would use unsafe, and presumably be more idiomatic. I have no idea if it would ever complete, or just get stuck in an endless loop. Or even if it did succeed, how many joules it would use.

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krater23 227 days ago
I'm sure when you try to get a AI to recreate such a tool, ths code would be unmaintainable, bloath, slow and shitty, but in the end it would work in some way. Interesting topic, but nothing to go productive with.
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pizlonator 228 days ago
> data race problems

No, Fil-C just makes races memory safe.

Also this is sort of changing the topic a bit since bzip is single threaded

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galangalalgol 228 days ago
Even if it wasn't single threaded, it would probably have been fine grained OMP style multithreaded which runs into far fewer issues. I was just making sure I understood what Fil-C was doing. I hadn't heard of it. It seems like a great thing.
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aitchnyu 225 days ago
Are they competing with WASM on performance?
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