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A comment on The Heartbleed Bug. Parent comment

Re:The Heartbleed Bug by comex on Monday April 07, 2014 @10:16PM (#7551058)
This is one reason I'd like to see the removed LLVM C backend brought back and modernized, with Rust as the source language. Rust is safe, has no mandatory garbage collector, and has a much lower impedance mismatch with C or C++ than most higher level languages, so it should work well for libraries that are expected to integrate with C code.
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Re:The Heartbleed Bug by andrewaylett on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @02:52AM (#7551817)
I'm not clear why you'd want to compile your rust down to C, only to then compile that C again? Surely you're better off with a single compiler invocation, and taking rust straight to object code?

I know that historically it's been easier to write a code generator than a compiler backend, but with LLVM you get the backend just as cheaply as the code gen.

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Re:The Heartbleed Bug by lmb on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @08:02AM (#7552799)
Makes it easier to target embedded arches. For example, LLVM doesn't target the MSP430 from TI, but there is a gcc fork for it. Sure, you can write a new backend for LLVM, but that's a whole different ballgame.

This way it would be Rust -> LLVM IR -> C -> GCC for MSP430.

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Re:The Heartbleed Bug by stormbrew on Monday April 07, 2014 @10:45PM (#7551161)
> removed LLVM C backend

What are you referring to here?

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Re:The Heartbleed Bug by Athas on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @01:57AM (#7551647)
LLVM used to have a backend that could convert its low-level bitcode to portable C.
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