Google's take on memory safety

[bachmeier]

On Sunday, 10 March 2024 at 09:34:28 UTC, Emmanuel Danso Nyarko 
wrote:
> On Sunday, 10 March 2024 at 04:24:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 3/9/2024 3:32 PM, Lance Bachmeier wrote:
>>> I "ported" a few thousand lines of C to D in a couple hours 
>>> this afternoon. That includes the time it took to put all C 
>>> memory allocation inside SafeRefCounted. With the overhead 
>>> out of the way (setting up the SafeRefCounted structs, 
>>> testing, and some minor other things) I bet I could easily 
>>> port 20,000 lines in an 8-hour day. Working directly with C 
>>> macros was the last thing needed to make this go fast.
>>
>> Thanks for posting that, I enjoy such testimonials!
>
> What about we build maybe a strategy to send D out there! We 
> must let the world see the power of D.

Show them working code. This is a separate project I did after 
the one I posted about in my previous comment.

https://github.com/bachmeil/d-gslrng

It took only a few hours and there's over 7000 lines of C. There 
are some nice features of this project:

- I made zero changes to the C code. Now that we have macro 
support, every line in the C files was copied and pasted. That 
means I get to reuse the decades of testing done on this popular 
library.
- I was able to strip out a small part of a much larger library. 
If I were calling into a C library, I'd be stuck with whatever 
they give me.
- There's no shared library dependency. That means support for 
every OS out of the box. No bindings or wrappers. Aside from the 
previous comment about stripping out most of the library, I can 
make changes to the functions if I want. With a shared library 
you either use what they give you or you maintain your own fork 
in order to share your work with others.