rustc_codegen_gcc: Progress Report #6

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

This month, a lot of progress happened here! My second patch was merged.

Also, some of my other patches got reviewed, were updated and some of them were approved:

These approved patches were not merged yet because there’s an earlier patch that needs to be merged before the others and was not approved yet.

The last on these patches is likely to be dropped in favor of one made by someone else.

State of rustc_codegen_gcc

Not much progress on this side, this month. I continued working on supporting integer types not supported on some platforms, but debugging assembly and GIMPLE takes a lot of time.

For the next month, I’ll continue working on this and perhaps get some other gcc patches merged.

How to contribute

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

  • Traverse-Research

  • 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:

  • kpp

  • repi

  • nevi-me

  • Alovchin91

  • oleid

  • acshi

  • joshtriplett

  • djc

  • TimNN

  • sdroege

  • pcn

  • steven-joruk

  • davidlattimore

  • Nehliin

  • colelawrence

  • zmanian

  • alexkirsz

  • regiontog

  • berkus

  • wezm

  • belzael

  • vincentdephily

  • mexus

  • jam1garner

  • Shoeboxam

  • 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

  • Daniel

  • Justin Ossevoort

  • sstadick

  • luizirber

  • kiyoshigawa

and a few others who preferred to stay anonymous.