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Comment by pavanky | Hacker News Reader

The C compiler is often the first thing ported over to new architectures because it is fairly easy to do. Rust probably will not come close to being that universal.

On the desktop side of things, it will probably continue to be the favored systems language until universities start incorporating rust into their curriculum. Very few people have the motivation and incentive to learn a new language to accomplish something they can accomplish in a language they already know.

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I ported C compilers (badly) and manage people who do it (well.) Today you port LLVM, either yourself or using a commercial LLVM backend generator. This makes Rust nearly as accessible as C (in that the platform vendor will bundle clang with some platform-specific extensions but not a Rust frontend with similar extensions. But the heavy lifting is the backend.)

This is not to say that Rust will spread like wildfire, just that porting C isn't easier.

There is also the chance to port backend formats like Mir [0] or Wasm [1] besides LLVM.

[0] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/04/19/MIR.html

[1] http://webassembly.org/

One way for Rust to become more pervasive in the University scene is for it to become an ICPC [0] language of which only Java, C/C++ and Python are currently used [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_P...

[1] https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/programming-environment

> The C compiler is often the first thing ported over to new architectures because it is fairly easy to do. Rust probably will not come close to being that universal.

Seems to be a good place to ask: Is there a comparison out there of the complexity of a "typical" C compiler versus the Rust compiler? To check if it would be actually possible to port Rust to new platforms easily?

Data point: in 1998, I wrote a C compiler from scratch (preprocessor to assembler) for a new ISA (Cray X-1) to support s/w development in a simulation environment, and it took me about 3 months and 6KLOC to get something that could build IRIX (later Linux) correctly.

Yeah, porting LLVM IR should be much easier these days. Not that it matters though, C legacy is not going anywhere.

There's been at least four or five universities that have taught classes in Rust; I believe there's two active ones this semester, and one or two more next semester. It's a start...

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