mrustc VS llvm-cbe

Compare mrustc vs llvm-cbe and see what are their differences.

mrustc

Alternative rust compiler (re-implementation) (by thepowersgang)

llvm-cbe

resurrected LLVM "C Backend", with improvements (by JuliaHubOSS)
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mrustc llvm-cbe
75 14
2,185 858
- 1.4%
5.5 7.0
3 days ago about 2 months ago
C++ C++
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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mrustc

Posts with mentions or reviews of mrustc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-08.
  • Why do lifetimes need to be leaky?
    6 projects | /r/rust | 8 Dec 2023
    No, you don't. Existential proof: mrustc ignores lifetimes. Just flat out simply ignores. It changes some corner-cases related to HRBT, yet rustc compiled by mrustc works (that's BTW mrustc exist: to bootsrap the rustc compiler).
  • I think C++ is still a desirable coding platform compared to Rust
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Nov 2023
    Incidentally C++ is the only way to bootstrap rust without rust today.

    https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

  • Rust – Faster compilation with the parallel front-end in nightly
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Nov 2023
    Well, there is mrustc[0], a Rust compiler that doesn't include a borrow-checker, so it's possible to compile (at least some versions of) Rust without a borrow checker, though it might not result in the most optimized code.

    AFAIK there are some optimization like the infamous `noalias` optimization (which took several tries to get turned on[1]) that uses information established during borrow checking.

    I'm also not sure what the relation with NLL (non-lexical lifetimes) is, where I would assume you would need at least a primitive borrow-checker to establish some information that the backend might be interested in. Then again, mrustc compiles Rust versions that have NLL features without a borrow-checker, so it's again probably more on the optimization side than being essential.

    [0]: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

    [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57259339

  • Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Oct 2023
  • Forty years of GNU and the free software movement
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Sep 2023
    > Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.

    It is possible to bootstrap rustc from just GCC relatively easily, although it's a little bit time consuming.

    You can use mrustc to bootstrap Rust 1.54: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

    And from then you can go through each version all the way to the current 1.72. (Each new Rust version officially needs the previous one to compile.)

  • Building rustc on sparcv9 Solaris
    1 project | /r/rust | 27 Jun 2023
    Have you tried this route : https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc ?
  • GCC 13 and the state of gccrs
    4 projects | /r/rust | 25 Apr 2023
    Mrustc supports Rust 1.54.0 today
  • Any alternate Rust compilers?
    10 projects | /r/rust | 10 Apr 2023
  • Stop Comparing Rust to Old C++
    10 projects | /r/cpp | 31 Jan 2023
    There are three. The official one, mrustc (no borrow checker, but can essentially compile the official rustc) and GCC (can't really compile anything substantial yet). Only rustc is production-ready though.
  • Can I make it so that only the newest version of Rust gets installed?
    1 project | /r/GUIX | 29 Jan 2023
    That probably depends on what you mean by problematic. Having an ever increasing chain of dependencies isn’t the most desirable situation so there has been some work to trim the bootstrap chain. In 2018, when the blogpost I linked above was written, mrustc was used to bootstrap rust 1.19.0; now mrustc can bootstrap rust 1.54.0 so the chain to recent versions is much shorter than if all those intervening versions back through 1.19.0 needed to be built. https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

llvm-cbe

Posts with mentions or reviews of llvm-cbe. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-30.
  • Ask HN: LLVM vs. C
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jun 2023
    So how does the LLVM C backend work then?

    https://github.com/JuliaHubOSS/llvm-cbe

  • rust to c complication?
    6 projects | /r/rust | 12 Nov 2022
    One alternative worth mentioning, though, would be the LLVM C Backend maintained by the Julia community.
  • Programming language that compiles to clean C89 or C99?
    2 projects | /r/AskProgramming | 30 Sep 2022
    If you drop "easily" and "human" (/s) from your requirements list, then the C backend for LLVM might work. Then you can choose any programming language you want that has LLVM 10-compatible frontend.
  • Easy way to convert a C++ library into straight C ?
    1 project | /r/cpp_questions | 30 Sep 2022
    If you really must have something that compiles in C (e.g. for a platform where you only have a C compiler) there's an LLVM backend that outputs C code: https://github.com/JuliaComputingOSS/llvm-cbe
  • Snowman native code to C/C++ decompiler for x86/x86_64/ARM
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2022
  • Can Rust do every low level stuff C/C++ do?
    7 projects | /r/rust | 9 Mar 2022
    You can convert llvm bitcode to C and then use C compiler, there is such project https://github.com/JuliaComputingOSS/llvm-cbe .
  • lipstick: a Rust-like syntax frontend for C
    7 projects | /r/rust | 17 Jan 2022
    I'm really surprised that the LLVM C backends have continually been resurrected then abandoned over the years. It's a good solution to this sort of thing and would enable a lot of cool stuff like Rust to weird embedded platforms. The most recent one is the Julia backend: https://github.com/JuliaComputingOSS/llvm-cbe
  • C++ to C converter?
    1 project | /r/cpp_questions | 1 Jan 2022
    Check this project out: https://github.com/JuliaComputingOSS/llvm-cbe.
  • Show HN: prometeo – a Python-to-C transpiler for high-performance computing
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Nov 2021
    Well IMO it can definitely be rewritten in Julia, and to an easier degree than python since Julia allows hooking into the compiler pipeline at many areas of the stack. It's lispy an built from the ground up for codegen, with libraries like (https://github.com/JuliaSymbolics/Metatheory.jl) that provide high level pattern matching with e-graphs. The question is whether it's worth your time to learn Julia to do so.

    You could also do it at the LLVM level: https://github.com/JuliaComputingOSS/llvm-cbe

    For interesting takes on that, you can see https://github.com/JuliaLinearAlgebra/Octavian.jl which relies on loopvectorization.jl to do transforms on Julia AST beyond what LLVM does. Because of that, Octavian.jl beats openblas on many linalg benchmarks

  • Writing a SQLite clone from scratch in C
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jul 2021
    You can try your luck with the "resurrected" C backend: https://github.com/JuliaComputingOSS/llvm-cbe

    I don't understand why I see so many requests for LLVM-based languages to change around their backend or IR, that seems to be a huge amount of work for comparatively little benefit. The correct thing to do there is to just add support for those to LLVM.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing mrustc and llvm-cbe you can also consider the following projects:

gccrs - GCC Front-End for Rust

llvm-project - Fork of LLVM with Xtensa specific patches. To be upstreamed.

gccrs - GCC Front-End for Rust

nim-esp8266-sdk - Nim wrapper for the ESP8266 NON-OS SDK

rust-ttapi

ulisp - A version of the Lisp programming language for ATmega-based Arduino boards.

winlamb - A lightweight modern C++11 library for Win32 API, using lambdas to handle Windows messages.

rust_sqlite - SQLRite - Simple embedded database modeled off SQLite in Rust

gcc-rust - a (WIP) Rust frontend for gcc / a gcc backend for rustc

acados - Fast and embedded solvers for nonlinear optimal control

miri - An interpreter for Rust's mid-level intermediate representation

prometeo - An experimental Python-to-C transpiler and domain specific language for embedded high-performance computing

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