GCC Rust Front-End Continues Advancing With Plans To Eventually Upstream

While the official/reference Rust compiler implementation is LLVM-based, there continues to be the independent effort working on a GCC Rust front-end as an alternative full implementation of the Rust programming language.

The GCC front-end for Rust continues advancing as an alternative compiler moving forward for Rust code though at the moment isn't feature complete or close to it for major features.

Per recent discussions though, the GCC Rust front-end developers are working to establish a GCC Git branch that will mirror their GitHub project. By having a formal GCC Git repository branch, they are hoping to help solidify their intention on getting the front-end upstreamed when ready. Similarly, they have already been enforcing copyright assignment to the FSF in preparing for that eventual upstreaming. Additionally, they are working to establish a separate GCC mailing list for this front-end for handling patch submission/review that way to complement their GitHub workflow as well. Their GitHub repository will continue to co-exist.

For those wanting to monitor the status of the GCC Rust front-end can do so via the weekly status reports. Most recently, they reached their generics milestone and are figuring out their traits support before moving onto pattern matching and imports/visibility. There are also two students working to improve GCC Rust this summer as part of Google Summer of Code.