Item — HN Reader

I would say that the title is easily misread. If you open the blog post and just read the title and a few lines into the intro, I think it's clear it's about C3 not having to implement any recently popular language features in order to solve the problem of memory lifetimes for temporary objects as they arise in a language with C-like semantics.

Now clearly people are misreading the title when it stands on its own as "borrow checkers suck, C3 has a way of handling memory safety that is much better". That is very unfortunate, but chance to fix that title already passed.

It should also be clear from the rest of the blog post that it doesn't try to make any claims that it's a novel technique (it's something that has been around for a long time). What's novel is that it's well integrated into the stdlib.

1 comments

> Now clearly people are misreading the title

This is so fucking obnoxious. There is no misreading. There is not misunderstanding. Any attempt to spin this as even in part a failure of the reader is so rude.

The title is nonsense. Nobody is misreading it, the author was either willfully misleading for clicks (eww) or was just ignorant (excusable, but they need to own it).

> That is very unfortunate, but chance to fix that title already passed.

…the CMS doesn’t let them edit it? What nonsense is this.

This is a lovely example of what professional communication does NOT look like. Incredibly disingenuous all around.

(I’d love better arena syntax in more languages though. They don’t get enough support.)

Let me paste the introduction in the post, and let's see how much it claims that C3 has memory safety:

Modern languages offer a variety of techniques to help with dynamic memory management, each one a different tradeoff in terms of performance, control and complexity. In this post we’ll look at an old idea, memory allocation regions or arenas, implemented via the C3 Temp allocator, which is the new default for C3.

The Temp allocator combines the ease of use of garbage collection with C3’s unique features to give a simple and (semi)-automated solution within a manual memory management language. The Temp allocator helps you avoid memory leaks, improve performance, and simplify code compared to traditional approaches.

Memory allocations come in two broad types stack allocations which are compact, efficient and automatic and heap allocations which are much larger and have customisable organisation. Custom organisation allows both innovation and footguns in equal measure, let’s explore those.

I read the post multiple times before commenting. The more I read it the worse it looks.