
Bountysource campaign to support the development of a Rust back end for GCC - cbmuser
https://www.bountysource.com/issues/86138921-rfe-add-a-frontend-for-the-rust-programming-language
======
cbmuser
After my last very successful Bountysource campaign to modernize the m68k
backend ([https://www.bountysource.com/issues/80706251-m68k-convert-
th...](https://www.bountysource.com/issues/80706251-m68k-convert-the-backend-
to-mode_cc-so-it-can-be-kept-in-future-releases)) 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:

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#Archit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#Architectures)

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#Back_ends](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/philberty/gccrs)

> [https://github.com/sapir/gcc-rust](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.

