Fil-C is new and is a viable competitor to rust, that's why you're hearing all asides about tiny niches, unacceptable performance degradation, etc.
Sweet summer child
There really are many people here, with largely diverse opinions. Don't lump people together unless they lump themselves together.
I’ve no horse in the race here, but the Fil-C page talks about a 4x overhead from using it, which feels like it would make it less competitive
It does a LOT of array access and updating, probably near to worst-case for code that isn't just a loop copying bytes.
The average slowdown is probably more in the same region as using Java or C# or for that matter C++ std::array or std:vector.
https://cr.yp.to/2025/20251028-filcc-vs-clang.html
I've heard Filip has some ideas about optimizing array performance to avoid capability checks on every access... doing that thread safely seems like an interesting challenge but I guess there are ways!
And, the kind of code he is interested in is not necessarily the same as the kind of code I'm interested in. In fact I know it's not!
As one more data point, compiling my little benchmark with gcc, without any optimisation flag.
1964ms gcc primes.c -o primes -O
3723ms fil-c primes.c -o primes -O
3753ms gcc primes.c -o primes
16334ms fil-c primes.c -o primes
It’s a pretty reasonable objection too (though I personally don’t agree). C has always been chosen when performance is paramount. For people who prioritise performance it must feel a bit weird to leave performance on the table in this way.
And Jesus Christ, give it a rest with this “Rust fans must be thinking” stuff. It sounds deranged.
Rewriting everything in rust "for memory-safety" is a false tradeoff given the millions of lines of C code out there and the fact that rewrites always introduce new bugs.
The vast majority of the conversation here is about GC and the performance implications of that. Please stick to the rest of the thread.
Not only that, but you can then use GC_FREE_SPACE_DIVISOR to tune RAM usage vs speed to your liking on a program by program (or even instance by instance) basis, something completely impossible with malloc().