from Hacker News

Sean Baxter: Safe C++ [video]

by awesomekling on 5/9/24, 5:13 PM with 17 comments

• by coffeeaddict1 on 5/9/24, 7:08 PM

  What this guy has achieved with Circle is nothing short of incredible! Writing an entirely new compiler (even if it's "just" a front-end to LLVM) and giving a concrete demonstration of a borrow checker for a beast of a language like C++ is crazy (considering that he received zero help from anyone but himself).

  However, I'm afraid that the ISO C++ group is not ready for his proposal. We're talking about a committee which has stubbornly and consistently shown that they are willing to sacrifice safety and ergonomics in the name of backward compatibility. The introduction of a borrow checker is a huge change that will get shut down because someone somewhere is unwilling to rewrite their (often broken) code and/or compile their binaries again.

• by rogerclark on 5/9/24, 6:49 PM

  Someone please acquihire Sean and his compiler! This guy is a once-in-a-generation polymath: an expert in compilers (obviously), GPUs (worked on CUDA at NVIDIA), physics and topography (JPL etc).

  Buy the compiler, get somebody who could build you a nuclear reactor, drug discovery simulator and a GPU architecture. Deal of the century.

• by pjmlp on 5/9/24, 6:17 PM

  Circle is the real Typescript for C++, still hopeful some of this stuff helps to steer C++ into the right direction.

  Too much infrastructure code and industry standards, that will be kept being done in C++ for decades to come, and need a way for improving the whole security story.

• by PaulDavisThe1st on 5/9/24, 7:44 PM

  It amazes me and makes me feel slightly more stupid to discover how much more easily I grok all this Rust stuff when it's expressed (elegantly) in what is basically C++.