Dozens Of Rust Updates Merged Ahead Of GCC 13.1

While the release of GCC 13.1 as the first stable GCC 13 compiler is due out in the next few weeks, ahead of that milestone dozens of Rust "gccrs" patches were merged today for furthering along that new language support.

New to GCC 13 is the initial Rust "gccrs" support that was merged at the end of last year and has continued to see more patches upstreamed ahead of the GCC 13.1 debut. GCC's Rust support isn't exactly usable for most developers yet but the target continues to get better.

Squeezing into GCC 13 today were another 88 GCC Rust patches as can be seen with the latest GCC Git.

Arthur Cohen who has been instrumental in this GCC Rust effort commented on the GNU Compiler Collection mailing list:

"We have been hard at work trying to get the Rust core library to compile, and hope to push more commits in the coming days as we try and upstream a more recent version of gccrs. All of the team has done a tremendous amount of work in the last few weeks, as we get closer and closer to compiling libcore 1.49.

Our focus before GCC 13 releases is to improve the documentation of the compiler and write more about the various flags used by the frontend, which a user will need to understand and interact with.

The commits we will be pushing before GCC 13 releases will not contain any "major breakthrough", as some functionality required to compile libcore properly will still take some time to implement. Very often used Rust macros such as `format_args` are defined within the core library, and require a high amount of work on the compiler side.

Furthermore, integrating libcore as part of GCC will require significant build system changes which are incompatible with the current GCC stage. We will be making these changes as soon as possible and integrate a version of libcore in GCC 14, as well as an implementation of the libproc_macro crate. We will be submitting these patches and pinging build system experts for extensive reviewing."

By the time GCC 14 rolls around next year, hopefully this GCC Rust support will be usable for those wanting an alternative to Rust's de facto LLVM-based official rustc compiler.