Any alternate Rust compilers?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/rust

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  • gccrs

    GCC Front-End for Rust

    (Speaking of which, Rust-GCC (or gcc-rs or gccrs or whichever other of their names they decide is the primary one) isn't even going to be a complete C++ implementation. Their plan is to implement enough to compile Polonius (the NLL 2.0 borrow checker being developed in Rust for rustc) and then share that since borrow-checking isn't necessary for codegen... only to identify and reject invalid programs... making the C++ portion of it not that different in scope from mrustc.)

  • rfcs

    RFCs for changes to Rust

    Work has, in fact, already started on a specification, too! Theres also Ferrocene, which seeks to certify a specific version of the compiler

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  • mrustc

    Alternative rust compiler (re-implementation)

  • rustc_codegen_gcc

    libgccjit AOT codegen for rustc

    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.

  • rustc_codegen_cranelift

    Cranelift based backend for rustc

    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.

  • lccc

    Lightning Creations Compiler Frontend for various languages

    Also on the list of compilers making progress is https://github.com/LightningCreations/lccc. It is also pure rust from top to bottom, with a completely custom intermediate architecture, call xlang.

  • llhd

    Low Level Hardware Description — A foundation for building hardware design tools.

    And it's not the only significant language oriented project, where other approaches won over rust recently. Important research projects like LLHD had in fact to be rewritten from rust to C++, before the finally got accepted and found their way into the MLIR and CIRCT(https://circt.llvm.org/) mainline code base.

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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