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So Rust is considering making a general backend which compiles to WASM first and then compiling that to native code, which could be faster and means that they w

by AgentME 10y ago

So Rust is considering making a general backend which compiles to WASM first and then compiling that to native code, which could be faster and means that they would be creating a general WASM->native compiler in the process? That sounds pretty useful and clever if I'm getting it right.

kibwen 10y ago
You're close (it's tricky to follow all these things feeding into all these other things). What they have right now is a prototype WASM -> IR -> pseudo-native code compiler (producing code only fit for being directly executed by a JS VM). What they're proposing is to flesh out the native code backend so that its output can be fed into the usual platform-native compiler toolchains. Then, they'd modify the Rust compiler to be able to produce the IR that this project (Cretonne) operates upon (which may be similar to, but is not precisely, WASM). So Rust would not be producing WASM directly, it would be producing code that is conceptually one level "below" WASM, but still one level above machine code. And yes, in the process this work would also enable the lower levels of a platform-native WASM toolchain.