gccrs VS rustc_codegen_gcc

The community has been very supportive of the gccrs (https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs) project, which is the main project to write a Rust compiler written in C.

There is a Rust front-end for GCC that is under active development [1]. If the chip vendors are not willing to develop and upstream a LLVM back-end then they can feel free to start contributing to it.

[1] https://rust-gcc.github.io/

That's why gccrs doesn't even consider lifetime checking a part of the language (they plan to use Polonius, too).

There's ongoing work on a Rust front-end for GCC (https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs). Bit barebones right now -- ie, even core doesn't compile -- but there's funding, demand, and regular progress, so it'll only get better from there. Once gccrs can compile core, it should be ready to compile most of Rust, and thus if you've taught the calling conventions for C to GCC, you're golden.

I recommend checking out the GCC Rust frontend project.

That is what theyre refering to, yes. The GitHub is named https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs

- But this misses so much extra context information

3. Macro invocations there are really subtle rules on how you treat macro invocations such as this which is not documented at all https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs/blob/master/gcc/rust/expan...

Some day I personally want to write a blog post about how complicated and under spec'd Rust is, then write one about the stuff i do like it such as iterators being part of libcore so i don't need reactive extensions.

That doesn't require a whole new frontend, just a GCC backend will be enough. This is in fact already being worked on with rustc_codegen_gcc https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_gcc

Alternatively, there's another initiative called codegen_gcc which is about using GCC as a backend for the rustc compiler. It's (much) more advanced in Rust support, but I am not sure how easy it would be to use a modified libgccjit from there.

In addition to what others have said about platform support, Rust is also on its way to gaining more platform support through rustc_codegen_gcc, the GCC codegen backend for rustc, as an alternative to the LLVM backend. That means many of the platforms GCC supports will suddenly become available with Rust.

Yeah, rustc_codegen_gcc is a GCC backend for rustc, and its making a lot of good regular progress.

gcc-rs is one of two projects for bringing Rust to gcc. gcc-rs is the more ambitious of the two, with an entirely new frontend. There is also rustc_codegen_gcc (https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_gcc) that keeps the rustc frontend, and only swaps out LLVM for GCC at the codegen stage.

Fixing unwinding in release mode is still ungoing. I could use some help here, so anyone with some understanding of unwinding, landing pads or GCC, please come on this issue to discuss this.

Additionally, there is gcc codegen for rustc (https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_gcc), which is not a compiler per se, but an alternative code generator, with more architectures supported and other nice things. It's also coming along, but there's still a lot of work to do there too. There's also Cranelift codegen (https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift), which is designed to make debug builds faster, but this is not as exciting/useful as the other 2.

Good idea. I added the tag "help wanted" to the issue.

Also, there are indeed ABI issues, e.g. for 128-bit integers and NaN.

I'm excited about both the backend & the frontend.