trophy-case VS rustc_codegen_gcc

You could check cargo-fuzz trophy case, which is a list of issues that have been found via fuzzing.

I've added it to the trophy case.

That said, what's present in what quantities under what circumstances in the Rust fuzzing trophy case does a pretty good job of illustrating how effective the Rust compiler is at ruling out entire classes of bugs.

The same fuzzing techniques applied to Rust yielded a lot of bugs as well. But in Rust's case only 7 out of 340 fuzzer-discovered bugs, or 2%, were memory corruption issues. Naturally, all of the memory corruption bugs were in unsafe code.

https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case has like 70 of my issues in it, including the nine minidump bugs

If you have found any bugs with this tool, perhaps add them to the Rust fuzz trophy case?

Source: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case (over 40 of those are just from me).

But to bring some data, check out the fuzz trophy case. It shows that failures in Rust are most often assertions/panics (equivalent to C++ exception) with memory corruption being relatively rare (it's not never—Rust isn't promising magic—but it's a significant change).

You need to read the list more carefully.

• The list is not for Rust itself, but every program every written in Rust. By itself it doesn't mean much, unless you compare prevalence of issues among Rust programs to prevalence of issues among C programs. For some context, see how memory unsafety is rare compared to assertions and uncaught exceptions: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case

• Many of the memory-unsafety issues are on the C FFI boundary, which is unsafe due to C lacking expressiveness about memory ownership of its APIs (i.e. it shows how dangerous is to program where you don't have the Rust borrow checker checking your code).

• Many bugs about missing Send/Sync or evil trait implementations are about type-system loopholes that prevented compiler from catching code that was already buggy. C doesn't have these guarantees in the first place, so lack of them is not a CVE for C, but just how C is designed.

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.