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How's your experience with Fil-C been? Is it materially useful to you in practice?

I’m biased since I’m the Fil.

It was materially useful in this project.

- Caught multiple memory safety issues in a nice deterministic way, so designing the object model was easier than it would have been otherwise.

- C++ with accurate GC is a really great programming model. I feel like it speeds me up by 1.5x relative to normal C++, and maybe like 1.2x relative to other GC’d languages (because C++’s APIs are so rich and the lambdas/templates and class system is so mature).

But I’m biased in multiple ways

- I made Fil-C++

- I’ve been programming in C++ for like 35ish years now


Are you using malloc + GC in preference to smart pointers, and if so why? I thought Fil-C was just C not C++?

It doesn't seem like that is necessarily a performance win, especially since you could always use a smart pointer's raw pointer (preferably const) in a performance critical path.


I’m curious. Given the overheads of Fil-C++, does it actually make sense to use it for greenfield projects? I like that Fil-C fills a gap in securing old legacy codebases, I’m just not sure I understand it for greenfield projects like this other than you happen to know C++ really well.

It made sense because I was able to move very quickly, and once perf became a problem I could move to Yolo-C++ without a full rewrite.

> happen to know C++ really well

That’s my bias yeah. But C++ is good for more than just perf. If you need access to low level APIs, or libraries that happen to be exposed as C/C++ API, or you need good support for dynamic linking and separate compilation - then C++ (or C) are a great choice


Hmmm… I did about 20+ years of C++ coding and since I’ve been doing Rust I haven’t seen any of these issues. It has trivial integrations with c/c++ libraries (often with wrappers already written), often better native libraries to substitute those c++ deps wholesale, and separate compilation out of the box. It has dynamic linking if you really need it via the C ABI or even rlib although I’ll grants the latter is not as mature.

The syntax and ownership rules can take some getting used to but after doing it I start to wonder how I ever enjoyed the masochism of the rule of 5 magic incantation that no one else ever followed and writing the class definition twice. + the language gaining complexity constantly without ever paying back tech debt or solving real problems.


This used to be true, but GCP forced their hand in January of 2024 with https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/eliminatin...

AWS matched a few months later:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

I'm not trying to convince you to stay (I work for neither anymore!), just wanted to note that you can technically request a waiver. I'm not sure how this works in practice though. Like, if you want to leave Athena and move to something on-premise is that enough to have just that workload? Maybe!

Edit: I also didn't follow this at the time, but the AWS wording suggests that the "EU Data Act" is also involved.


AWS DTO is a complete lie.

This doesn't actually work as advertised. I attempted free data egress from AWS in December. It took them 31 days to respond to my initial ticket. At which point they gave me a multi-page questionnaire to determine eligibility and they also told me I could not begin DTO until 60 days had passed from approval of the questionnaire.

By the time I was allowed "free egress" my cumulative S3 storage charges over the prior 100 days would have roughly matched the cost of egress if I just did so originally.

I'm in the US so the EU Data Act protections don't apply.


Have you tried to use the DTO? I did. They make you fill in a form saying you'll migrate all services (despite the blog post saying that isn't necessary), and then they take up to 12 weeks to make a decision. In my case they rejected it on a formality after 2 weeks and said to try again (the timer starts again).

So in my case that would have been 14 weeks plus the time to migrate away. The egress costs are equivalent to around 17 weeks storage cost. So you save around 1c/gb if they don't find some reason to reject it.


If you're in the EU and subject to the law, it might be easier to just transfer the data out and then sue them to get your money back.

I did transfer out and pay. How do I sue and how likely is it they close the account out of revenge and I lose the ~50GB that still needs to be there

The EU Data Act forbids cloud switching charges, that's why they made these changes (while presenting them as if they cared about customers being charged for switching away):

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/data-act-...


Yeah, but that missing context is super important.

If they want it for local dev work, that's pretty different from wanting a high-performance air gapped object store without rewriting clients.

They seem to know what they're doing (having complained about a methodology problem in MinIO), and yet don't personally want to throw their hat in the ring not maybe pay anyone...

Context matters!


Neat. I wish I could select just a couple lines at once though. I feel like the 1/2/3 plus one of the other lines would make something more appealing.

Compared to roll-your-own with S3 or GCS it does :)


Semanticness as a measurement.


Please don't editorialize titles unless they're clearly clickbait.

"Designing AI for Disruptive Science" is a bit market-ey, but "AI Risks 'Hypernormal' Science" is just a trimmed section heading "Current AI Training Risks Hypernormal Science".


Thanks, but please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) when you see things like this, so we can take action more quickly.


Will do. I wanted mostly to (re)inform the submitter.


Our sixth generation sensor suite is intended for winter driving: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... for some nice visuals.


Ooh, that's a worthy challenge. Of course, I can imagine getting enough data on all of those cities and deciding to launch everywhere else but not Boston "because your roads are garbage and you all drive like you're impaired 24/7" :-)


On recent podcasts, Ilya says he's no longer assuming they can jump straight there.


Maybe the author isn't aware that Chainguard is going to keep patching MinIO for CVEs:

https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/secure-and-free-minio-c...

You wouldn't get the other changes in this post (e.g., restoring the admin console) but that's a bit orthogonal.


They can probably merge them.


> This project is currently under maintenance and is not accepting new changes.


> The entire global software industry is worth less than $1 trillion dollars

Are you saying "worth" as a shorthand for something like annual profit? If you sort the 2025 data by earnings, you get pretty large numbers quickly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_technology_com...

That's not how you should measure "worth". In that world, you'd have a P/E ratio of 1. Comparing to a bond, it would be like expecting to get paid the face amount in a single year. Many people are quite happy with 5-10% interest as a risky benchmark, so 10-20 P/E isn't wild. That puts the market cap for tech itself at 10-20T as a reasonable baseline.


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