What this guy has achieved with Circle is nothing short of incredible! Writing an entirely new compiler (even if it's "just" a front-end to LLVM) and giving a concrete demonstration of a borrow checker for a beast of a language like C++ is crazy (considering that he received <i>zero</i> help from anyone but himself).<p>However, I'm afraid that the ISO C++ group is not ready for his proposal. We're talking about a committee which has stubbornly and consistently shown that they are willing to sacrifice safety and ergonomics in the name of backward compatibility. The introduction of a borrow checker is a <i>huge</i> change that will get shut down because someone somewhere is unwilling to rewrite their (often broken) code and/or compile their binaries again.
Someone please acquihire Sean and his compiler! This guy is a once-in-a-generation polymath: an expert in compilers (obviously), GPUs (worked on CUDA at NVIDIA), physics and topography (JPL etc).<p>Buy the compiler, get somebody who could build you a nuclear reactor, drug discovery simulator and a GPU architecture. Deal of the century.
Circle is the real Typescript for C++, still hopeful some of this stuff helps to steer C++ into the right direction.<p>Too much infrastructure code and industry standards, that will be kept being done in C++ for decades to come, and need a way for improving the whole security story.
It amazes me and makes me feel slightly more stupid to discover how much more easily I grok all this Rust stuff when it's expressed (elegantly) in what is basically C++.