MBmbrock·Dec 14, 2025
If you're into Nix, check out https://github.com/mbrock/filnix — not yet integrated & maintained in upstream Nixpkgs, but lets you replace Nix/NixOS packages with Fil-C versions quite easily.
In Linux Sandboxes and Fil-Cmbrock
filnix
Rocq Prover2025–2025
mbrock / filnix
filnix
Fil-C as a Nix C/C++ toolchain and cross platform
2Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
145GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Fil-C as a Nix C/C++ toolchain and cross platform
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by week4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2025-10-28 21:56:06 UTC to 2025-12-14 18:15:58 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 27 | 2025-10-27 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-11-03 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Nov 3 | 2025-11-03 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-11-10 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Nov 10 | 2025-11-10 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-11-17 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 17 | 2025-11-17 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-11-24 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 24 | 2025-11-24 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 1 | 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-12-08 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 8 | 2025-12-08 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-12-15 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesCheck out this document to see how the Fil-C ports of Python and Perl and so on work:
https://github.com/mbrock/filnix/blob/main/ports/analysis.md
This is still within the userspace application realm but it's good to know that Fil-C does have explicit capability-preserving operations (`zxorptr`, `zretagptr`, etc) to do e.g. pointer tagging, and special support for mapping pointers to integer table indices and back (`zptrtable`, etc).
In Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementationI'm working on packaging Fil-C for Nix, as well as integrating Fil-C as a toolchain in Nix so you can build any Nix package with Fil-C.
https://github.com/mbrock/filnix
It's working. It builds tmux, nethack, coreutils, Perl, Tcl, Lua, SQLite, and a bunch of other stuff.
Binary cache on https://filc.cachix.org so you don't have to wait 40 minutes for the Clang fork to build.
If you have Nix with flakes on a 64-bit Linux computer, you can run
nix run github:mbrock/filnix#nethack
right now!
In Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation