Google's take on memory safety

[bachmeier]

On Wednesday, 13 March 2024 at 20:49:01 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Wednesday, 13 March 2024 at 19:18:20 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> 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.
>
> [snip]
>
> Cool!
>
> So this proves that importC works on a limited subset of gsl. 
> Do you have any reason to believe it wouldn’t work on the whole 
> library?

I'd be surprised if there's anything it can't compile. I've 
compiled lots of other parts, but split this one out because I 
don't want to add hundreds of unnecessary files if all I want to 
do is generate random draws in parallel.