>>>>> John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > The programming language Rust has become very popular over the past few years > with many projects rewriting parts of their codebase in that language. While > these rewrites often make the code perform faster and potentially safer, using > Rust makes these projects less portable as Rust is limited to the > architectures > supported by LLVM which are less than the ones supported by GCC. > > For this reason, people have been asking for a Rust frontend for GCC similar > to > the one for Go. Now, there are actually two independent implementation of a > Rust > frontend for GCC [1, 2] being developed and I was wondering whether it would > be > desirable to help this development with a Bountysource campaign? > > I'm asking because I'm not sure whether GCC upstream would be okay having a > Rust > frontend in GCC at all and, if yes, it would be okay to have a Bountysource > campaign > for that project? > > I personally like the idea of a Rust frontend for GCC very much as I expect > more > software projects in the future to adopt Rust and I would like to be able to > build > and use these projects on architectures that LLVM doesn't support yet (and > might > not even in the future). > > Due to the popularity of Rust and the desire of the community for an > independent > implementation, I expect the Bountysource campaign to be rather successful.
The earlier, public discussions about a Rust front-end were open and welcoming. The GCC Community and GCC Steering Committee would be happy to consider a Rust front-end that can be contributed and accepted into GCC and is maintainable. As David Malcolm previously commented, something similar to the adaptor for GCC Go or an adaptor for rustc seems the most productive approach. GCC gains nothing by creating unnecessary barriers to support for popular programming languages. Thanks, David
