GCC Rust is approved to be included in the mainline code base, or will meet you in GCC 13

Organization | Peng Huizhong Editor-in-Chief | Tu Min
Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

The GCC (GNU Compiler Collection, GCC) Steering Committee has approved the GCC Rust front-end, which is powered by the GNU compiler suite for the Rust programming language.The GCC Steering Committee has announced that the Rust frontend "GCC Rust" is suitable for inclusion in the GCC mainline codebase, and may be merged into the mainline before next year's GCC 13 release.

GCC Rust thrives

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GCC Front-End For Rust (also known as GCC Rust) is a complete alternative implementation of the Rust language on top of GCC with the goal of being upstream of the GNU toolchain.The official Rust compiler implementation is based on LLVM, and GCC Rust is a front-end project, and unlike LLVM, the compiler will gain full access to all GCC internal mid-range optimization passes.Projects that are tightly integrated with GCC can often benefit from GCC plugins.Of course, GCC will also bring support for more target architectures, and the GCC-based Rust compiler will make GCC Rust easier to start on new platforms.

At the time of this project's inception, Rust was at version 0.9, and now that the Rust language is stable enough, the time has come to create an alternative compiler.Since November 2020, developer Philip Herron has been working on GCC Rust full-time, and with the joint efforts of him and the entire community, GCC Rust is gradually entering the mainline.

The project is still in its early stages and the goal is to be the first to implement compiling the official Rust test suite, and the community hopes to have at least "test" level support for the Rust programming language in GCC 13, which will be available around April next year as aStable version released.

Rust's design principles are "safe, concurrent, and practical", and can achieve memory safety while ensuring the same performance as native compiled languages.Such features have also prompted more and more companies to use the Rust programming language to support Rust projects.Rust for Linux is also expected to be implemented in Linux 5.20.

The voice of the developers

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The announcement sparked a lively discussion on Haker News by more than 400 developers, with many celebrating the news with joy.

One developer commented: "This is awesome! GCC's support for Rust opens up more platforms to Rust, achieves more goals, and makes it easier to interact with the wide variety of general-purpose embedded tools built around CGG.Chain integration opportunities. And GCC is free software, which is important to those who care."

Photo source Haker News

However, some developers have doubts about this: "What is the benefit of having multiple compilers for a programming language? Is there a situation where a Rust program compiled with GCC does something that LLVM cannot?Will it lead to the fragmentation of the Rust ecosystem?"

Photo source Haker News

Such concerns have also been answered by a number of developers.One developer stated: "1. GCC has more backends than LLVM. 2. Competition is generally good. 3. This is expected to cause inconsistencies between GCC and rustc (the compiler for the Rust programming language); because Rust doesn't really have a specification. That would force both parties to discuss and resolve these issues."

Photo source Haker News

Another developer also responded: "One benefit is that it forces the language to articulate the standard, rather than having the implementation define the feature set. Standards tend to bring stability and durability to the language, while also making it easier to write newcompiler and make it more portable."

Photo source Haker News

In general, the growth of GCC Rust carries a lot of expectations. By April next year, we may be able to meet it in GCC 13. So fellow developers, what do you think of GCC Rust?

Reference link: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2022-July/239057.html

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