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Carbon Language Successor Strategy: From C++ Interop to Memory Safety - Chandler Carruth - CppNow 23

CppNow · 24.3K views · 2023-09-08 · 1:38:57

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Overview

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2023 talk describes Carbon as a successor language to C++ rather than a superset, focusing on C++ interop and a path to memory safety in large existing codebases. It explains why Carbon takes a different approach from Cpp2 and Circle.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as the authoritative statement of Carbon's memory safety plans, including its borrow-checker-like direction.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2023–2024

Topics

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesProgramming language design
Search by tags
carbonc++memory safetyinteropborrow checkerlanguage design

What people said

josh11b · 2024-11 · Recommendation

(Carbon lang dev here.) Carbon is intended to be memory safe! (Not sure whether you intended to write a double negative there.) There are a few reasons that might not be clear: * Carbon has relatively few people working on it. We currently are prioritizing work on the compiler at the moment, and don't yet have the bandwidth to also work on the safety design. * As part of our migration-from-C++ story, where we expect code to transition C++ -> unsafe Carbon -> safe Carbon, we plan on supporting unsafe Carbon code with reasonable ergonomics. * Carbon's original focus was on evolvability, and didn't focus on safety specifically. Since then it has become clear that memory safety is a requirement for Carbon's success, and will be our first test of those evolvability goals. Talks like [VIDEO] better reflect more recent plans around this topic.

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Vt71fcAqt7 · 2024-06 · Reference

>Carbon wants to ship a finished working Carbon language, then bolt on safety (somehow) but, only for some things, not data races for example, so, you still don't actually have Rust's Memory Safety I'm not sure this is correct. As I understand it, Carbon's plan is to add a borrow checker like Rust's. From a recent talk[0][1] by one of the lead developers: >Best candidate for C++ is likely similar to Rust’s borrow checker [0] slides: [LINK] [1] relevant timestamps: [VIDEO] [VIDEO]

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Vt71fcAqt7 · 2024-06 · Reference

You're right. In fact it was in the previous slide[0] from that same talk. Thanks for pointing that out. [0] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by CppNow, played through YouTube.

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