Developers looking to continue working in the C and C++ programming languages amid the global push to promote memory-safe programming now have another option that doesn’t involve learning Rust.
Filip Pizlo, senior director of language engineering at Epic Games, has created his own memory-safe flavor of C and – because why not? – named it after himself.
Pizlo got in touch after seeing our report on TrapC – a memory-safe C-fork due for release next year.
“I wanted to alert you to the existence of Fil-C, a personal project of mine, which exists today, does just about everything TrapC claims to do (including being totally memory-safe), and is freely available,” Pizlo explained. “It aims for 100 percent compatibility with C and C++ – just compile your stuff with my compiler and you get memory safety.”
The US government and other interested parties are rather keen to encourage memory safety – something not available out of the box for C and C++ code. C and C++ require manual memory management, which has been shown to be inadequate for preventing memory safety bugs like out of bounds reads and writes.
