Mozilla's Rust Language Gets A GCC Compiler Front-End

A Rust language front-end is under development for the GNU Compiler Collection. Rust is Mozilla's programming language under development that's similar to C/++ and aims to be a safe, concurrent practical language.

Up to now all of the work around the Rust compiler has been implemented atop LLVM, but now GCC developer Philip Herron has decided to work on a Rust compiler front-end for the Free Software Foundation's compiler.

Herron has been working on the "gccrs" branch for a while already and he's been coding this language front-end to better learn the Rust language. The front-end though has been making quick progress, he noted, "Currently it compiles alot of rust already in fairly little effort on my side GCC is doing loads of the heavy lifting. Currently it compiles most of the basic stuff such as a struct an impl block while loop, functions expressions calling methods passing arguments etc. Currently focusing on getting the typing working correctly to support & and ~ and look at how templates might work as well as need to implement break and return."

For more details on this gccrs Rust compiler, check out the announcement made today on the GCC mailing list. Another interesting milestone for the Rust language recently was the ability to make Rust UEFI-bootable applications. For more details on the language itself and/or the upstream Rust LLVM compiler, visit Rust-Lang.org.