I’m biased since I’m the Fil.
It was materially useful in this project.
- Caught multiple memory safety issues in a nice deterministic way, so designing the object model was easier than it would have been otherwise.
- C++ with accurate GC is a really great programming model. I feel like it speeds me up by 1.5x relative to normal C++, and maybe like 1.2x relative to other GC’d languages (because C++’s APIs are so rich and the lambdas/templates and class system is so mature).
But I’m biased in multiple ways
- I made Fil-C++
- I’ve been programming in C++ for like 35ish years now
Are you using malloc + GC in preference to smart pointers, and if so why?
It doesn't seem like that is necessarily a performance win, especially since you could always use a smart pointer's raw pointer (preferably const) in a performance critical path.
I’m curious. Given the overheads of Fil-C++, does it actually make sense to use it for greenfield projects? I like that Fil-C fills a gap in securing old legacy codebases, I’m just not sure I understand it for greenfield projects like this other than you happen to know C++ really well.
It made sense because I was able to move very quickly, and once perf became a problem I could move to Yolo-C++ without a full rewrite.
> happen to know C++ really well
That’s my bias yeah. But C++ is good for more than just perf. If you need access to low level APIs, or libraries that happen to be exposed as C/C++ API, or you need good support for dynamic linking and separate compilation - then C++ (or C) are a great choice
Hmmm… I did about 20+ years of C++ coding and since I’ve been doing Rust I haven’t seen any of these issues. It has trivial integrations with c/c++ libraries (often with wrappers already written), often better native libraries to substitute those c++ deps wholesale, and separate compilation out of the box. It has dynamic linking if you really need it via the C ABI or even rlib although I’ll grants the latter is not as mature.
The syntax and ownership rules can take some getting used to but after doing it I start to wonder how I ever enjoyed the masochism of the rule of 5 magic incantation that no one else ever followed and writing the class definition twice. + the language gaining complexity constantly without ever paying back tech debt or solving real problems.
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