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A comment on Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust. Parent comment

Re:Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust by JoshTriplett on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @02:21AM (#24339049)
All of those frontends live inside the GCC source tree. Which requires copyright assignment to contribute to. And for a long time, it was difficult to "casually contribute" to GCC; you had to work towards "commit access", and it wasn't anyone's job to review other people's patches, so often it just didn't happen. And there are various other barriers to contribution as well.

LLVM's license was certainly a factor, and I'd never suggest otherwise, but there were many other reasons that GCC couldn't help kick off a wave of language design and experimentation the way LLVM did.

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Re:Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust by pjmlp on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @02:31AM (#24339086)
No they do not.

GNU Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, BASIC and plenty of OEM derived ones were never part of GCC source tree.

I had to study GIMPLE and GCC integration as part of my compiler design studies back in the 90's, using those nice Walnut Creek CD-ROMs.

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Re:Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust by JoshTriplett on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @03:09AM (#24339257)
Sure, you could also fork all of GCC as part of your frontend. That's still a massive undertaking compared to a framework that's designed to be used as a library.
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