Carbon is performance-first, so ABI instability is the default. We plan to have opt-in ABI stability, but that story is not well developed yet. Replacing C as the lingua franca is not a goal, at least not yet.
The nightly release of the Carbon compiler can be used via https://carbon.compiler-explorer.com/ . Note that it is definitely a work in progress, it hasn't even reached our v0.1 goals yet, but a good chunk of important functionality is working.
10^12 < 256^5 ≈ 1.1e+12, which isn't too bad. You could also use 10^118 < 256^49, which wastes less but is in bignum land.
But don't you want 10^x to be slightly bigger than 256^y, so you could represent all length-y byte sequences in x-digit number? In this direction, there's 10^53 > 256^22, but that is still in bignum land.
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTJ9omXOQ0 better reflect more recent plans around this topic.
It most definitely contains ads since it is about ads.