Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector

Hmm, Fil-C seems potentially really important; there's a lot of software that only exists in the form of C code which it's important to preserve access to, even if the tradeoffs made by conventional C compilers (accepting large risks of security problems in exchange for a small improvement in single-core performance) have largely become obsolete.

The list of supported software is astounding: CPython, SQLite, OpenSSH, ICU, CMake, Perl5, and Bash, for example. There are a lot of things in that list that nobody is likely to ever rewrite in Rust.

I wonder if it's feasible to use Fil-C to do multitasking between mutually untrusted processes on a computer without an MMU? They're making all the right noises about capability security and nonblocking synchronization and whatnot.

Does anyone have experience using it in practice? I see that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134852 reports a 4× slowdown or better.

The name is hilarious. Feelthay! Feelthay!

SQLite in Rust https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso

CPython in Rust https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython

Bash in Rust https://github.com/shellgei/rusty_bash

Turso says:

> Warning: This software is ALPHA, only use for development, testing, and experimentation. We are working to make it production ready, but do not use it for critical data right now.

https://rustpython.github.io/pages/whats-left says:

> RustPython currently supports the full Python syntax. This is “what’s left” from the Python Standard Library.

Rusty_bash says:

> Currently, the binary built from alpha repo has passed 24 of 84 test scripts.

The CPython implementation is farther along than I had expected! I hope they make more progress.