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Rust-GCC
gccrs
C++2013–2026
Rust-GCC / gccrs

gccrs

GCC Front-End for Rust

41Distinct people
46Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

GCC Front-End for Rust

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year46 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-10-26 03:09:03 UTC to 2026-10-14 23:33:51 UTC.

0510152013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 1 submissions, 13 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 0 submissions, 14 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14113
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14014
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404

What Hacker News says

46 sources
> Rust is managed by the Rust Foundation This is not quite true: the Foundation handles things like receiving and distributing some payments, helping conferences, employing people for operations (crates.io), and ownership of the trademark. But Rust the language and toolchain is managed by the people doing the work https://rust-lang.org/governance/ > It’s completely possible that Rust’s compiler contains a backdoor. And nobody would know. Now this last point is highly speculative and conspiratorial, Yes. > but I’m not the only one concerned about it.4 The only way to compile Rust’s compiler is using a binary package of the previous version released by the Rust Foundation. Or using https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc. And it is not released by the Foundation. > Since there exists only a single fully-functional, usable implementation of
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the Rust compiler, the Rust Foundation must be trusted. > Considering its history, owners, and track record of issues with mismanagement,5 The linked to blogpost is about a fuck up that a subset of people in the project, who were responsible for RustConf, caused. The ones with leadership position stepped down from them out of their own volition. The Foundation in particular had absolutely nothing to do with the whole fiasco. > I find it hard to trust it at all. > My suggestion is: slow down. First, the community should focus on improving the Rust language itself instead of trying to “improve” other projects by rewriting them. I propose using that energy to help the GCC Front-End for Rust project6—an alternative compiler which would alleviate the concerns for the possible presence of a backdoor. Currently, it’s in an early phase of development. Who is the OP talking to? Slow what down? Because there are people working on https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs. I don't work on it, because I do what I do on my spare time and I find it more rewarding to improve the user experience of rustc itself, instead of implementing the same logic for the third time in a language I don't particularly enjoy. Others are equally disinclined to work on a C++ frontend implementation. The project certainly spends its time focused on improving the language. It is also hard to tell people in the Rust Project what to do: it is open source, it is a showupocracy. The people working on it are already at their limit on what responsibilities they can take on. If the target audience of the blogpost is "the community", I also think it misses the mark. The "X rewritten in Rust" announcements I would see before LLMs would be the projects' own maintainers desiring to use Rust, and not external sources imposing it on others. There have been over enthusiastic people (and trolls) bothering projects in issue trackers and mailing lists, but I've never seen a level of volume commensurate to the meme's fame. (Nowadays I see vibe-coded projects done in Rust, but those are also not imposing their codebase on other existing projects beyond sucking up the air out of the room and making it annoying to read news aggregators due to high volume and low quality). > And the people associated with Rust often don’t seem to have the best intentions in mind, or are just following a trend without thinking for themselves. That's quite a view you have of people like myself and my colleagues. I have significant disagreements on how some facts and opinions are framed in the blogpost, but closing with stating that I and my colleagues in the project are ill intentioned and/or don't think for ourselves absolutely ensures that I won't be listening to anything else you have to say in the matter. Back when Twitter was a thing I'd spend time searching for "negative Rust sentiment" because it was an excellent way of finding unpublished feature requests and real issues that needed to be addressed, after sieving through the less than productive way those real problems were presented with. This latter emotional labor was also the reason that it caused a round of burn out, until I realized that if something is A Problem, more than one person will ultimately hit it. Which means that if there are two people raising the same point, you don't need to waste your time engaging with the one being an asshole, and instead spend your time engaging with the one that will be productive.
In Problems with the Rust Language
> There are many architectures that NetBSD supports where Rust is not available Are there many architectures that NetBSD supports where GCC is not available? The rustc_codegen_gcc project allows using the rustc compiler to target any architecture that GCC supports. I think it is pretty far along. https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_gcc > getting a Rust compiler running in the first place is hard > bootstrap relies on a binary package > the compiler would also have to be part of the base system The gccrs project aims to make Rust a fully supported language in GCC. It is fully self-hosting and can be built from source. Once accepted, it will be one of the languages you get when you build GCC. https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs When gccrs is ready, it will address all the above objections. Linux faces the same issues. Today, Rust is op
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tional in Linux and can be skipped on any platform not supported in LLVM and rustc. For Rust to become mandatory in Linux, gccrs is going to be required (for some platforms). > the release cycles of Rust are not compatible with the NetBSD ones I do not fully grasp the objection here. Obviously NetBSD would not be forced to use any Rust features they cannot compile. And using gccrs for the NetBSD kernel would not prevent them from bundling LLVM and rustc as well if they want. Anyway, I am not advocating the use of Rust in NetBSD. I am merely pointing out that solutions to the issues raised are being worked on.
In Rust in the NetBSD Kernel, and other odd decisions
Why? It depends on what you want to replace, but the Rust project has a long history of using tools written in other languages. Python is used a lot in build tooling, bors-ng was written in Elixir, llvm is written in c, ... gcc-rs doesn't contain a lot of rust code either, it's purely other languages according to https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs Fundamentally, if a tool is good and provides benefits then why not use it? You'll be met with concerns about maintainability if you just airdrop something written in Ada/SPARK, but that's fair - just as it was fair that the introduction of Rust in the linux kernel was indeed met with concerns about maintainability. It seems that those were resolved to the satisfcation of the group that decides things and the cost/benefit balance was considered net positive.
In Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
>> Is it possible that rust also uses MLIR as backend and thus benefits from a modern backend? Compiler backends require corresponding compiler frontends to do lexical analysis and parsing of the programming language into the intermediate representation (IR) that the backend accepts. The Rust compiler frontend currently lexes and compiles Rust source code into LLVM IR. It is possible to create a Rust frontend that lexes and compiles into other intermediate representations and there are several related projects: 1) gccrs (https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs) is creating a GCC frontend for Rust that can be used with the GCC backend. 2) Cranelift (https://cranelift.dev/) is creating an alternate LLVM IR-based backend for Rust written in Rust since the current LLVM backend is written in C++. 3) rustc_codegen_gcc (https://github.com/rust-lan
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g/rustc_codegen_gcc) is creating a bridge between the Rust compiler LLVM IR frontend and the GCC backend. So, while it is possible to create a Rust frontend to lex and parse Rust source code into MLIR I am not aware that anyone is working on it.
In Ask HN: Why rust cannot use the same compiler back end as mojo?
The biggest problem Rust has is that "no_core" is so poorly understood at this point that i doubt a comprehensive spec is even possible to explain: 1. Type inference taking into account higher ranked trait bounds - Slices in libcore work via the Index lang item so its like taking an index operator overload to a range lang item but the generic types in the range need to be unified with the higher ranked trait bound to eventually figure out that they are meant to be of usize. 2. Method resolution its almost a joke at this point how complicated it is in Rust. - The autoderef cycle sounds simple when you read this: https://web.mit.edu/rust-lang_v1.25/arch/amd64_ubuntu1404/share/doc/rust/html/book… - But this misses so much extra context information 3. Macro invocations there are really subtle rules o
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n how you treat macro invocations such as this which is not documented at all https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs/blob/master/gcc/rust/expan... </rant> Some day I personally want to write a blog post about how complicated and under spec'd Rust is, then write one about the stuff i do like it such as iterators being part of libcore so i don't need reactive extensions.
In GCC 13 and the State of Gccrs

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