I think the claim is that GCC supports a few obscure platforms that LLVM doesn't. Don't ask me which, that is just the claim that I heard multiple times. So it's not Rust that limits platforms, but LLVM. And they say the GCC backend efforts of Rust are meant to deal with that.
reply> Don't ask me which
replyThere are many. Two big ones are Alpha and PA-RISC. NetBSD and Linux continue to support both. Linux distro choices are pretty much limited to Gentoo though.
1. You've got the causality backwards. LLVM backends don't come for free, you have to write code to enable support for them.
reply2. LLVM does not support as many backends as GCC does, so even if you did get 100% of the LLVM supported backends up and running, you'd still be missing some.
Worth adding to this: there may also be code needed in the rust part (not just the llvm part) to enable support for a target triplet. There certainly will be for the OS and libc part of the triplet: what specific syscalls exist and should be used to implement the standard library on a particular flavour of BSD etc.
replyBut even for the architecture part there can be differences. For example, my understanding is that a lot of the calling convention details need to be handled by the frontend in LLVM, leading rustc to duplicate logic from clang here. Things like varargs FFI with C code can be particularly gnarly.
Yep! All good info.
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