nico VS rustc_codegen_cranelift

I think everything depends on the scale of your ideas, see https://johanpeitz.itch.io/picocad You can make something similar with Nico https://github.com/ftsf/nico :)

Game framework: Nim + Pico-8 = Nico

I love making games with Nico: https://github.com/ftsf/nico

Concise and readable, small binaries, fast compile times, native performance, zero-overhead interop lets you reuse code in C, C++, JS, Objective-C, Python... Does a programming language have these fantastic features? Of course, Nim language does have the features I have been dreaming about. And what is the goal of Nim language? Simply put, the goal is "one language to rule them all", from shell scripting to web frontend and backend, scientific computing, deep learning, blockchain client, gamedev, embedded.

Something to look at if you want to encourage simple game development is supporting PICO-8 [0], or the compiled Nim version Nico [1].

[0]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=faq

[1]: https://github.com/ftsf/nico

Some more fun high level frameworks:

- HaxeFlixel (https://haxeflixel.com/) (Extremely portable)

- Phaser (https://phaser.io/) (HTML5 framework)

- Nico (https://github.com/ftsf/nico) (The PICO-8 API in Nim)

- Pixel Vision 8 (https://pixelvision8.github.io/PixelVision8Website/) (Another fantasy console)

Windows is supported. See https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_cranelift/issues/....

> When this happens, it seems like it'll be possible to get the LLVM bits out of the bootstrap process and lead to a fully self-hosted Rust.

What do you mean by "when this happens"? GP's point is that this has already happened: the Cranelift backend is feature-complete from the perspective of the language [0], except for inline assembly and unwinding on panic. It was merged into the upstream compiler in 2020 [1], and a compiler built with only the Cranelift backend is perfectly capable of building another compiler. LLVM hasn't been a necessary component of the Rust compiler for quite some time.

[0] https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/77975

Note that the Cranelift codegen will eventually become standard for debug builds to speed them up.

Maybe one day we'll have rustc b3 backend like what they did with Cranelift

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.

For the instant reloading, that's in Sycamore, so you should speak to its devs, but as for the alternative compiler backend, it's not my project, but it uses Cranelift and works pretty well! See https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift for details.

The more immediate goal of "distribute the cranelift backend as a rustup component" has been making good progress and seems like it might happen relatively soon https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift/milestone/...