On Fri, 2019-12-27 at 10:53 -0500, David Edelsohn wrote: > > > > > > 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.
Indeed; another approach might be a libgccjit backend to the existing rustc compiler - that would live in the rustc compiler, though I guess (rust bindings to libgccjit already exist, IIRC). Dave
