rustc_codegen_gcc: Progress Report #4

What is rustc_codegen_gcc?

rustc_codegen_gcc is a GCC codegen for rustc, meaning that it can be loaded by the existing rustc frontend, but benefits from GCC by having more architectures supported and having access to GCC’s optimizations.

GCC patches status

No progress for the review of my gcc patches this month.

I did fixed a previous one though: it’s to set the initial value of a global variables. I also added the ability to create struct and array rvalues to be able to use those types as initial values.

Status of merging into rustc

The PR adding this project into rustc was merged! Now, I’ll start changing the rustc API to make it more convenient to use in this project and also to allow me to implement some features I would not be able otherwise (like unwinding). Here’s what I plan to do in the long term:

  • Divide the Value type into three types: RValue, LValue and Function.

  • Refactor the landing pad stuff into a more friendly interface for libgccjit which uses try/catch.

  • Separate aggregate operations into different operations for structures, arrays and vectors.

  • Refactor the handling of basic blocks to make it less error-prone for the gcc codegen (if possible).

  • Refactor the API to make it less error-prone to an IR that is more AST-based than instruction-based (if possible).

State of rustc_codegen_gcc

Here’s what has been done this month:

(As you can see, the project has been moved into the rust-lang organization!)

With those fixes, more UI tests pass as can be seen in the CI:

test result: FAILED. 4353 passed; 85 failed; 50 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 551.86s

For the next month, I’ll add the support for some integer sizes on platforms not supporting them (like 128-bit integers on 32-bit platforms) since people want to start adding the support for new architectures now that this project is merged upstream. I might also start working on implementing unwinding: that will require changing the rustc API in addition to add the support for try/catch in libgccjit.

How to contribute

I had a slide in my LPC talk that I forgot to mention and it was about how to contribute to this project. (You can find all the slides on this page.)

rustc_codegen_gcc

If you want to help on the project itself, please do the following:

  1. Run the tests locally.

  2. Choose a test that fails.

  3. Investigate why it fails.

  4. Fix the problem.

Even if you can’t fix the problem, your investigation could help, so if you enjoy staring at assembly code, have fun!

Crates and rustc

If you would like to contribute on adding support for Rust on currently unsupported platforms, you can help by adding the support for those platforms in some crates like libc and object and also in the rust compiler itself.

Test this project

Otherwise, you can test this project on new platforms and also compare the assembly with LLVM to see if some optimization is missing.

Good first issue

Finally, another good way to help is to look at good first issues. Those are issues that should be easier to start with.

Thanks for your support!

I wanted to personally thank all the people that sponsor this project: your support is very much appreciated.

A special thanks to the following sponsors:

  • igrr

  • saethlin

  • embark-studios

  • TraverseResearch

  • Shnatsel

A big thank you to bjorn3 for his help and reviews. And a big thank you to lqd and GuillaumeGomez for answering my questions about rustc’s internals. Another big thank you to Commeownist for his contributions.

Also, a big thank you to the rest of my sponsors:

  • repi

  • nevi-me

  • Alovchin91

  • oleid

  • acshi

  • joshtriplett

  • djc

  • TimNN

  • sdroege

  • steven-joruk

  • davidlattimore

  • Nehliin

  • colelawrence

  • zmanian

  • alexkirsz

  • regiontog

  • berkus

  • wezm

  • belzael

  • vincentdephily

  • mexus

  • evanrichter

  • stuhood

  • yerke

  • bes

  • raymanfx

  • seanpianka

  • srijs

  • 0xdeafbeef

  • kkysen

  • messense

  • riking

  • rafaelcaricio

  • Lemmih

  • memoryruins

  • pthariensflame

  • senden9

  • Hofer-Julian

  • robjtede

  • Jonas Platte

  • spike grobstein

  • Oliver Marshall

  • Sam Harrington

  • Cass

  • Jonas

  • Jeff Muizelaar

  • Robin Moussu

  • Chris Butler

  • Dakota Brink

  • sierrafiveseven

  • Joseph Garvin

  • Paul Ellenbogen

  • icewind

  • Sebastian Zivota

  • Oskar Nehlin

  • Nicolas Barbier

and a few others who preferred to stay anonymous.