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by mbrock 13 hours ago
There is an unsafe call primitive in stdfil that was used to support constant time crypto functions when Fil-C didn't have support for inline assembly.

Fil-C now has support for inline assembly, so it's not needed anymore, and I believe indeed the intention is to remove it, since Fil-C is not supposed to have any unsafe hatches.

Fil-C is not Linux only by design, that's completely false.

By the way, if you don't want a culture war, you gotta stop warring.
3 comments
MatejKafka 9 hours ago
> By the way, if you don't want a culture war, you gotta stop warring.

I find it hard to understand how could steveklabnik's comment be seen as warring.

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steveklabnik 8 hours ago
> Fil-C now has support for inline assembly, so it's not needed anymore, and I believe indeed the intention is to remove it, since Fil-C is not supposed to have any unsafe hatches.

See, this is nuance! Nuance is good! But you can't go around saying "fil-c has no escape hatches" when it has one, even if that one is planned on being removed.

> Fil-C is not Linux only by design, that's completely false.

Can you explain to me how it would work on other platforms? It currently does not, and I don't see how it can. Or at least, not without more "escape hatches."

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mbrock 8 hours ago
It would work basically the way it works on Linux? What makes you think it's somehow fundamentally Linux-specific?
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steveklabnik 8 hours ago
On non-Linux platforms, you must go through a system provided shared library rather than make syscalls directly. fil-c has its own ABI, and so it has its own libc that uses it. You cannot recompile those other systems's libc (or equivalent) with fil-c, therefore, the strategy used on Linux cannot work.

This is one reason why Rust has unsafe: you have to interact with inherently unsafe APIs in order to do anything meaningful with the operating system. fil-c needs an equivalent of some kind, and so isn't better or worse here, it's just the reality of how these systems work.

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landr0id 6 hours ago
>you must go through a system provided shared library rather than make syscalls directly

Just to add to this, on Windows for example you're really only supposed to invoke syscalls via ntdll as the syscall table is not stable so their numbering changes over time. You cannot guarantee forward or backward compat if you do not use the library.

If you look at some of the syscalls in https://github.com/j00ru/windows-syscalls, you can see they clearly do change over time too.

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ModernMech 10 hours ago
Can I install Fil-C on Windows without WSL or Cygwin?
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