[philberty]

Overall 2 major question come up about GCC Rust and they are not easy to answer but here is part of my perspective on the issue.

1. Keep up with rustc language development 2. How do we handle inconsistencies in behaviour

For inconsistencies, we have stated in our FAQ that if GCC rust does not behave the same as rustc. Then it is a bug with GCC rust. So it is not fruitful for us to raise issues with rustc until we can compile and run the test suite, even though I have some edge cases worth exploring.

Keeping up with the language is a more difficult one, and it depends on your outlook. From my perspective, I think it would be ideal if Rust would version the language. For example, every new release of rustc might include:

- New unstable lang features. - new language editions (like the upcoming 2021) - Stdlib updates and stabilisations. - Features like incremental compilation. - Bug fixes. - Dependencies updates like LLVM.

This is a lot of stuff that might change, and it's only the rust compiler version that gets updated for all of this work. I can see why this is the case, and it has benefits, but I am not sure rust editions are enough.

Currently, there is little to no benefit to picking a version of Rust to target. When new features are stabilised like const generics, this means state of the art in developing robust rust crates changes overnight, pushing the whole ecosystem onto the latest version of rustc. This is neat in some ways, but I am unsure how this will play out in the long run for Rust.

For me, an alternative front-end from GCC means backing from the GCC toolchain and a way to backport Rust to older versions of GCC. This also means that custom arch vendors whose only toolchains are custom GCC/binutils can also benefit from Rust as it will be part of the upstream project.

We can also explore things like language versioning with the gcc toolchain. Or explore some of the standardization efforts which I do think is important.

Other than that, big projects are fun, (I'm a huge fan of Andreas Kling serenity-os), there is a lot of low hanging fruit for people to make their mark on the compiler. Also, I thought I understood Rust, but it's exciting when you start getting into the nitty gritty.