alt Hacker NewsI assert there is no reason to rewrite LLVM in Rust.
And I also assert that the speech that Rust is going to take over the C++, misses on that as long as Rust depends on LLVM for its existence.
Or ignoring that for the time being NVidia, Intel, AMD, XBox, PlayStation, Nintendo, CERN, Argonne National Laboratory and similar, hardly bother with Rust based software for what they do day to day.
They have employees on WG14, WG21, contribute to GCC/clang upstream, and so far have shown no interest in having Rust around on their SDKs or research papers.
> I assert there is no reason to rewrite LLVM in Rust.
Everybody agrees with that, though? Including the people writing rustc.
There's a space for a different thing that does codegen differently (e.g. Cranelift), but that's neither here nor there.
> And I also assert that the speech that Rust is going to take over the C++, misses on that as long as Rust depends on LLVM for its existence.
There's a huge difference between "Rust depends on LLVM because you couldn't write LLVM in Rust [so we still need C++]" and then "Rust depends on LLVM because LLVM is pretty good". The former is false, the latter is true. Rust is perfectly suited for writing LLVM's eventual replacement, but that's a massive undertaking with very little real value right now.
Rust is young and arguably incomplete for certain use cases, and it'll take a while to mature enough too meet all use cases of C++, but that will happen long before very large institutions are also able to migrate their very large C++ code bases and expertise. This is a multi-decade process.