Fil-C is a fanatically compatible memory-safe implementation of C and C++. Lots
of software compiles and runs with Fil-C with zero or minimal changes. All
memory safety errors are caught as Fil-C panics. Fil-C achieves this using a
combination of concurrent garbage collection and invisible capabilities (each
pointer in memory has a corresponding capability, not visible to the C address
space). Every fundamental C operation (as seen in LLVM IR) is checked against
the capability. Fil-C has no unsafe escape hatch of any kind.
The compiler (clang + LLVM) is covered by LLVM-LICENSE.txt. The runtime is covered by PAS-LICENSE.txt (see libpas/LICENSE.txt in the source distribution). The libc is covered by MUSL-LICENSE.txt (see yolomusl/COPYRIGHT and usermusl/COPYRIGHT in the source distribution). The libc++/libc++abi are covered by LLVM-LICENSE.txt.
You can fetch the compiler, runtime, libc++/libc++abi source from https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge.
You can fetch musl source from https://github.com/pizlonator/deluded-musl (there are two of them - the yolomusl branch for the libc that sits below the runtime and the usermusl branch for the libc that sits above the runtime).
Fil-C only works on Linux/X86_64.
Previous versions worked on Darwin/ARM64 and FreeBSD, but now I'm focusing just on Linux/X86_64 because it allows me to do a more faithful job of implementing libc. There's nothing fundamentally stopping Fil-C from working on ARM or OSes other than Linux.
If you downloaded Fil-C binaries, run:
./setup.sh
If you downloaded Fil-C source, run:
./setup_gits.sh
./build_all.sh
Then you'll be able to use Fil-C from within this directory. There is no way to "install" it, because that would be a crazy thing to do for such an experimental piece of software!
Lots of software packages work in Fil-C with zero or minimal changes, including big ones like openssl, CPython, SQLite, and many others.
Fil-C has full support for C and C++ plus almost all of the extensions that clang 17 supports. Fil-C has excellent support for atomics and SIMD intrinsics, for example.
Fil-C catches all of the stuff that makes memory safety in C hard, like:
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Out-of-bounds on the heap or stack.
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Use-after free (also heap or stack).
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Type confusion between pointers and non-pointers.
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Type errors arising from linking.
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Type errors arising from misuse of va_lists.
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Pointer races.
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System calls. All buffers passed to system calls are checked for bounds and type.
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Lots of other stuff.
Fil-C comes with a reasonably complete POSIX libc and even supports tricky
features like threads, signal handling, mmap/munmap, longjmp/setjmp,
and C++ exceptions.
You can learn more about Fil-C by reading these docs:
You can also e-mail me: [email protected]
Follow me on Twitter.
File issues at GH.