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1. GCC has more backends than LLVM. 2. Competition is good in general. 3. I expect this will trigger inconsistencies between GCC and rustc; because Rust doesn't

1. GCC has more backends than LLVM. 2. Competition is good in general. 3. I expect this will trigger inconsistencies between GCC and rustc; because Rust doesn't really have a specification. Which will force both parties to discuss and solve them.

faisal_ksa 4y ago
Thank you so much. The specification point is very important
israrkhan 4y ago
and to back up your point... There should be at least 2 implementations for anything to be a spec/standard.
tomjakubowski 4y ago
Being on gcc, a long-lived platform, also helps ensure the survival of the language even if development of the current compiler (or LLVM) dies or withers.
- duckerude 4y ago
  Does it? GCC's Java frontend died and is no longer shipped, they need maintainers like any other compiler.
  - genewitch 4y ago
    GCJ is no more? It was being used within recent memory for things, i thought. I am out of the loop though, so if this is true, that's interesting and a bit weird.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Since 2009 actually. Most contributors eventually moved into OpenJDK after it became available. GCC folks left it around for a couple of years, because GCJ unit tests exercised parts of the compiler no one else did. Eventually they decided it wasn't worth that maintenance cost to keep it around only for that purpose.
- apple4ever 4y ago
  GCC support of Objective-C is very very poor.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    It is at the level NeXT was forced to contribute back to upstream.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Reimplementing ObjC 2.0 would be very hard. You have to be precisely bug-compatible with Clang to implement ARC correctly.
netheril96 4y ago
> I expect this will trigger inconsistencies between GCC and rustc; because Rust doesn't really have a specification. Which will force both parties to discuss and solve them. More likely that GCC has to follow all the bugs and quirks of rustc or no people will use GCC for Rust.
nickitolas 4y ago
> 1. GCC has more backends than LLVM Did you mean target platforms? If so, how is this not already addressed by the rustc gcc (Via libgccjit) backend?

faisal_ksa 4y ago

Thank you so much. The specification point is very important

israrkhan 4y ago

and to back up your point... There should be at least 2 implementations for anything to be a spec/standard.

tomjakubowski 4y ago

Being on gcc, a long-lived platform, also helps ensure the survival of the language even if development of the current compiler (or LLVM) dies or withers.

duckerude 4y ago
Does it? GCC's Java frontend died and is no longer shipped, they need maintainers like any other compiler.
- genewitch 4y ago
  GCJ is no more? It was being used within recent memory for things, i thought. I am out of the loop though, so if this is true, that's interesting and a bit weird.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Since 2009 actually. Most contributors eventually moved into OpenJDK after it became available. GCC folks left it around for a couple of years, because GCJ unit tests exercised parts of the compiler no one else did. Eventually they decided it wasn't worth that maintenance cost to keep it around only for that purpose.
apple4ever 4y ago
GCC support of Objective-C is very very poor.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  It is at the level NeXT was forced to contribute back to upstream.
- astrange 4y ago
  Reimplementing ObjC 2.0 would be very hard. You have to be precisely bug-compatible with Clang to implement ARC correctly.

netheril96 4y ago

> I expect this will trigger inconsistencies between GCC and rustc; because Rust doesn't really have a specification. Which will force both parties to discuss and solve them. More likely that GCC has to follow all the bugs and quirks of rustc or no people will use GCC for Rust.

nickitolas 4y ago

> 1. GCC has more backends than LLVM Did you mean target platforms? If so, how is this not already addressed by the rustc gcc (Via libgccjit) backend?