alt Hacker News> The main disadvantage of Rust right now is not supporting some more obscure platforms
Last time I checked, I got impressed by the wide platform support, once you go down the tier list (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm...). What "obscure platform" specifically are you thinking about, that is currently missing from those lists?
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Just to be clear, I think this is a very small disadvantage. GCC and therefore C/C++ supports some old stuff like SuperH, Intel Itanium, PA-RISC and a bunch of microcontroller archs that LLVM does not.
However, there is now a Rust codegen plugin for GCC, so even this disadvantage is now basically moot.
Rewrite all the things!
yeah this makes no sense to me. Why would Rust limit the LLVM backend's ability to generate code for a particular platform?
The list of supported GCC architectures is here: https://gcc.gnu.org/backends.html
LLVM doesn't have an equivalent annotated list, but it is missing alpha, bfin, c6x, fr30, frv, gcn, h8300, ia64 (aka Itanium), lm32, m32c, m32r, mcore, mep, microblaze, mmix, mn10300, moxie, nds32, nios2, pa (aka PA-RISC), pdp11, pru, rl78, rs6000, rx, sh (aka SuperH), storm16, v850, vax, and visium. For its part, LLVM does have some targets that GCC doesn't have (mostly related to GPU compilation).
The "big" targets that GCC has that LLVM lacks are Alpha, Itanium, PA-RISC, and SuperH, with Itanium being sufficiently weird that it's pretty firmly in the "fuck this" category from a maintainer's perspective, and people are actively ripping out support for it.