Fil-C: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out [video]

(I'm separately skeptical that it's the most important memory safety property; I suspect that a review of Chrome and Firefox 0days would show that UAFs and type confusion are, at least to attackers, equally if not more important.)

  for i in some_arr {
    println!("{i}");
  }

With Fil-C, the "unsafe blocks" live entirely within the compiler and runtime. With Rust, the unsafe foundation is the Rust compiler and standard library, as well as any unsafe code within your application or dependencies.

So either way you're in the same situation of relying on the correctness of the unsafe code you depend on. But there are two major differences:

- Unsafe code can be written in Rust, instead of inside the compiler. This is much easier to write and to review for correctness.

- People other than Fil are allowed to write unsafe Rust. This is what Fil's point is about, and yes, it allows you to opt-in to increasing your attack surface by trusting unsafe code written by yourself or your dependents. Rust allows the user to choose where they draw the trust boundary, and Fil-C does not.

It's true that Fil is probably better than I am at writing unsafe code. So "Fil-C is safer than Rust" is true in that sense. But Fil-C is certainly not safer than safe Rust. And sure, you can't run all the Rust code in the world if you compile with '--deny unsafe_code'; but Fil-C can't run all the C code in the world either. Unsafe Rust is rarely needed, mostly only if you want to do pointer crimes or FFI, and Fil-C doesn't support a lot of (perfectly legal) pointer crimes and FFI either.

There are roughly two categories of Rust user:

1. People who are using Rust for application development. Most of these users write zero unsafe blocks in their careers. For these users, "memory safety" was probably not a strong reason to pick Rust, because there are a wealth of other memory-safe application development languages out there.

2. People who are using Rust for systems programming (i.e. programming under resource or environment constraints). These users may write unsafe for performance reasons, or to do things like hardware MMIO; and they're using Rust over C/C++ either for security or just because the tooling is nicer.

The first category of user is unlikely to consider C for application development in this decade; they're going to be comparing Rust against Go or Java or Node.js. Fil-C solves the security problem of memory safety, but it does not free the developer from the difficulty of having to manually write memory-safe C code; their program will just crash if they get it wrong.

The second category of user cannot use Fil-C because of its performance overhead, runtime requirements and/or lack of escape hatches for MMIO/FFI.

Where Fil-C does shine is for legacy application software written in C. Here, it's a free lunch: a way to harden the massive amount of existing software without an expensive rewrite. I would love to see distros shipping pizlonated coreutils, ffmpeg, systemd, curl, sudo, postgres, etc., anything that has a big attack surface, but does not need to be memory-unsafe.

This is a problem I care about a lot, and your work here is truly a monumental advancement in the field. Comparisons to Rust sell it short by inviting endless debate on problems largely tangential to Fil-C.

That said, I've spent too much of my life chasing implicit control flow to accept exceptions. Heck, C++'s "noexcept" is a strong argument against exceptions all by itself.

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2024/05/02/unw...