Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is great. This is exactly the sort of language people insisting on C for systems programming need. It is basically the same language, but with a few bounds checks inserted by the compiler that eliminate almost all problems with C.

I hope this gains some traction amongst the large open-source C applications. (Things like emacs, xmms2, etc.)

View on HN

Much as I agree, I'd say widespread adoption is iffy at best. For one thing, Cyclone was last updated in 2006. For another, Cyclone imposes some performance degradation (about 50% slower, according to one paper). For many projects, performance is the reason they're using C in the first place.

But for many more projects, C is just there because it was there at the start. For those Cyclone seems very ok.

I would say that only a very small percentage of C programs are C for speed. Often, they are C for historical reasons instead. (I can't think of any program I use on a daily basis that is C-for-performance, but I can think of a lot that are written in C. This means I get all the crashes and security problems associated with C, but I spend all my time waiting in IO and can't see any of the benefits. These applications would do very well with Cyclone.)

I think the garbage collector will prohibit this (that and it's very academic)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com