After my last very successful Bountysource campaign to modernize the m68k backend (https://www.bountysource.com/issues/80706251-m68k-convert-th...) in GCC, I have decided to create another campaign to stimulate the development of a Rust frontend for the GCC compiler collection.
The idea is to get an independent implementation of the Rust language similar to what gccgo is providing for the Go language as an alternative to Google's own Go compiler.
The main advantage of having a Rust frontend for GCC would be to be able to build Rust code on a larger amount of architectures since GCC supports quite a lot of more of architectures as compared to the original Rust compiler which is limited by the comparibly small list of architectures supported by LLVM which is used as a backend for Rust:
My hope is that we can collect enough money in the community to help speed up the development of either of these Rust backends and get them merged into GCC within the foreseeable future.
I have already discussed this project extensively with multiple GCC developers and they all agree that a Rust frontend would be greatly welcomed by GCC upstream.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 11.0 ms ] threadThe idea is to get an independent implementation of the Rust language similar to what gccgo is providing for the Go language as an alternative to Google's own Go compiler.
The main advantage of having a Rust frontend for GCC would be to be able to build Rust code on a larger amount of architectures since GCC supports quite a lot of more of architectures as compared to the original Rust compiler which is limited by the comparibly small list of architectures supported by LLVM which is used as a backend for Rust:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#Archit...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#Back_ends
There are currently two projects which aim to develop a Rust backend for GCC, these are:
> https://github.com/philberty/gccrs
> https://github.com/sapir/gcc-rust
My hope is that we can collect enough money in the community to help speed up the development of either of these Rust backends and get them merged into GCC within the foreseeable future.
I have already discussed this project extensively with multiple GCC developers and they all agree that a Rust frontend would be greatly welcomed by GCC upstream.