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by dikaiosune 3605 days ago
There are two nascent alternative Rust compiler projects that I know of. One is https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc, which does not aim to be a GCC or LLVM front-end, and seems aimed at bootstrapping rust on platforms with only C/C++ support. The author of this alt compiler says they're able to parse and typecheck libcore (the small OS independent part of the standard library). They are working on codegen so they can start making use of the rustc compiler tests. I don't think they aim to implement the borrow checker, though, because their goal is bootstrapping rustc on other platforms, and the borrow checking can be verified using a different compiler.

There's also a frequent user of the rust irc channels who is experimenting with writing a GCC front-end for rust. I don't think any code for that is public yet, and I don't know how far along they are.
1 comments
nickpsecurity 3605 days ago
I mean, I'm guessing here, but wouldn't simplest way be starting mid-way in the existing Rust compiler to port an intermediate language to GCC? Straight-up compile it to GCC C or whatever GCC does internally. That way, you get the parsing, analysis, etc for free plus any improvements they make. Lots of other languages used this approach.
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dikaiosune 3605 days ago
I'm pretty sure mrustc isn't targeting GCC as a backend, but I'm not sure.

I don't know what approach is being taken by the person working on a GCC backend, but it's entirely possible what you've described is what they're doing.

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harrytodorov 3604 days ago
> I'm pretty sure mrustc isn't targeting GCC as a backend, but I'm not sure.

I'm pretty sure your statement is somewhat paradoxical :)

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