Initial GCC Rust Front-End Compiler Patches Submitted For Review

Following this month's approval by the steering committee of GCC Rust as a compiler front-end for the Rust programming language, the first formal series has been sent out for review.

GCC-Rust has been coming together nicely and now with having the blessing of the steering committee, GCC 13 next year should have this preliminary Rust support but still in early form. For example, the borrow checker and other features have still to be tackled.

Herron Philip on Wednesday sent out "Rust frontend patches v1" as a set of four patches laying out the initial code. He wrote on the gcc-patches list, "This is the initial version 1 patch set for the Rust front-end. There are more changes that need to be extracted out for all the target hooks we have implemented. The goal is to see if we are implementing the target hooks information for x86 and arm. We have more patches for the other targets I can add in here but they all follow the pattern established here."

These GCC Rust patches have been re-based atop the latest upstream GNU Compiler Collection code-base and layout the skeleton for this new front-end, provide the initial target hooks for i386 and ARM, and then begin laying out the front-end code.

This GCC Rust code still needs to be more closely reviewed but the hope is that everything will align for having it debut as part of GCC 13 that will see its stable release around April of 2023.