3

Is it possible to compile Rust for the MMIX architecture?

From what I understand about the Rust compiler (which is admittedly not a whole lot) it uses LLVM as a backend; coming from a C and gcc background, I know that gcc can produce MMIX executables but I'm not sure how to get the same result from rustc.

Does anyone know how one would go about doing this? Or pointers as to where I should start searching?

Thank you

Christian Hudon
  • 1,881
  • 1
  • 21
  • 42
Cole Reynolds
  • 413
  • 4
  • 7
  • 1
    I don't think you can get away with just flipping an LLVM flag and getting something that would run. For example, there's [a directory](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/tree/master/src/librustc_back/target) of target architectures, some (tiny) [runtime shims](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/tree/master/src/rt/arch), etc. However, you might be able to start [without the standard library](http://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/book/no-stdlib.html). – Shepmaster May 11 '15 at 16:04
  • 1
    Using `no_std` looks like the right place to start; the issue now becomes how to target the LLVM IR for MMIX. – Cole Reynolds May 11 '15 at 16:20

1 Answers1

3

Not a super helpful answer, but you could look at my pull request where I implemented support for powerpc: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/20980

(And then the followup where I unbroke some stuff in libc that I messed up the first time around: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/21500)

Some things have moved around in the meantime, but this should give you a general idea of which places you'll need to poke. I feel like I should mention though that while the general approach to architecture support has been to officially support few architectures, but hold in tree others, it's worth noting that especially boutique arches that are breakage prone might be an uphill battle if you want official support in core: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/26505

richo
  • 8,717
  • 3
  • 29
  • 47