Fil-C is a garbage collected, capability-based variant of C and C++ that achieves complete memory safety with zero unsafe escape hatches while retaining enough compatibility that lots of existing programs compile and run with no changes. Fil-C can run things like CPython and OpenSSH. This talk describes the goals and key insights of Fil-C and shows preliminary performance data.

I work on compilers and language runtime systems at Apple. Most of my work there involves the WebKit open source project.