News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:GCC Rust: GCC Front-End for Rust by davidhyde on Sunday January 10, 2021 @04:45PM (#25720293)
Great point! If anyone is curious about how to write an “empty” loop that is not compiled away, I've seen this common implementation that doesn’t even need the standard library:

loop {

core::sync::atomic::compiler_fence( core::sync::atomic::Ordering::SeqCst);

}

Re:GCC Rust: GCC Front-End for Rust by jdoerfert on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:00PM (#25721229)
Since https://reviews.llvm.org/D86841, ~ Aug 2020, Clang is able to reason about the forward progress guarantees of the input. For the LLVM-IR handling see https://reviews.llvm.org/D86233. While we are still adding more fine-grained support of different language standards and corner cases, e.g., constant loop condition in C vs. C++, you should be able to tell LLVM a loop is allowed to loop forever w/o side-effect. In fact, that is the new default. That said, LLVM still removes calls to functions without side effect unconditionally. We are working on that, i.a., https://reviews.llvm.org/D94106.