Hacker News Reader

Comment by muldvarp | Hacker News Reader

> Is it so crazy to claim that this can be replicated for C, without encumbering it with ownership considerations that have no relationship to interface formality?

You're not replicating what Rust does, you're replicating what Frama-C does.

Then again, even just replicating what Rust does would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) given the pervasiveness of undefined behavior in C.

> Fair enough. We have a much more generous definition of "working prototype" than you do.

How many useful C programs do you know that require no loops and no binary operators?

View on HN

> Xr0 1.0.0 will enable programming in C with no undefined behaviour, but for now it's useful for verifying sections of programs.

Literally on the website. The purpose of the prototype is to show the feasibility of the approach we've taken, not to work on whole programs.

> The purpose of the prototype is to show the feasibility of the approach we've taken

But it doesn't do that. You haven't shown that this approach is able to deal with loops and loops are pretty fundamental to every C program.

Heck, you haven't technically shown that this approach can deal with binary operators. I would love to turn Xr0 into an improptu SAT solver, but without `&&` and `||` that sadly isn't possible right now.

You missed the `!=`, `==` (in many instances), bitwise operators, recursion and `goto`. (And much, much more.)

Xr0 is a work in progress, and we'll get there step-by-step.

Yes, the subset of C it currently supports is so small I'm really puzzled what you think this prototype is proving. That you can parse C?

It's even less impressive than that. That we can parse a subset of C. That's all there is to see here.

Then why not write a blog post "We can parse C" instead of "Xr0 makes C safe (it doesn't actually and we are unable or unwilling to go into details and also please don't ask us about Frama-C)"?

Shouldn't it be called "We can't parse C" since we can only parse a trivial subset of it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com