mrustc VS winlamb

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).

Incidentally C++ is the only way to bootstrap rust without rust today.

https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

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

> 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.)

Have you tried this route : https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc ?

Mrustc supports Rust 1.54.0 today

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.

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

The first thing that came into my mind was: why not simply go fully native, with the aid of something like WinLamb? Often you can roll your own custom controls quicker than a cross-platform library.

With WinLamb it's trivial: just create a field in the class.

However, if you still want to go Win32, this library is a thin wrapper which may save you a lot of time (and sanity). However, it's C++, not C.

I write C++ and raw Win32 for more than 20 years. I'm the author of this, and I'm rewriting my personal stuff in Rust just for fun.

I wrote a very thin C++11 wrapper for Win32 a few years ago, in case you're interested: WinLamb. It won't do everything, it just covers window creation and messaging, and leaves room to plug any other Win32 stuff on top of it.

Take a look at WinLamb source if you want to see how to build a native GUI.

Given my C++ Win32 background, the very first thing I tried was to write a native Win32 GUI app in Rust. It later became the WinSafe crate, which is strikingly similar to WinLamb C++ lib. The Rust experience was awesome. The correctness of the type system was something I really appreciated, things C++ cannot give you.

I write native Windows stuff sometimes, and I use Windigo, which I wrote based on my WinLamb C++ lib. It's a GUI system over raw Win32, so this has the disadvantage that you'll have to learn some Win32... but it has the advantage that you have the unleashed power of Win32 at your fingertips.