rust-analyzer VS rustc_codegen_cranelift

go build 3.62s user 0.76s system 171% cpu 2.545 total

I was looking forward to parallel front-end[4], but I have not seen any improvement for these small changes.

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

For example, intelephense can show diagnostics in real time, there is no need to save the file to get new diagnostics. But rust-analyzer, the language server for rust, can only update diagnostics after saving the file.

6. Rust Analyzer

The rust-analyzer readme suggests you go here for support request. But even there, you'll need to provide more details to get useful help.

For example: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer/blob/master/docs/...

> If you create an LSP, it will work best in VS Code.

Any editor can work just as well as (or even better than) VS Code.

So, apparently the reason why rust-analyzer, the LSP server for Rust does not have persistent caching is because it would make "optimizing initial passes less important".

All I want to know is: Will it have a build configuration pulldown?

I am not a Rust dev. It surely looks great.

However, from what I understand it seems to supply just a parser separate from the Rust compiler (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer/tree/master/crate...) trying to keep up with Rust‘s development. So, in principle, it could have been just another treesitter parser plugin, too.

So, again, the LSP framework does not directly provide any magical benefit over a static parsing framework. All the semantic analysis capabilities stem from a good parser.

rust-analyzer > manual > helix > binary > rustup component add rust-analyzer

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/...