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Comment by dwheeler | Hacker News Reader

It may not seem like it, but this is impressive progress. Getting a compiler to bootstrap at all is an accomplishment, especially for Rust since that depends on so many things working. Once it can reliably bootstrap, a lot of performance-improving steps can begin. Congrats!

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I'm not that deep into gcc. Would it really add a lot of performance gain?

I don't think the goal is performance (and I don't think a well optimised gcc implementation will improve performance). I think the comment you are replying to is speaking about performance because of things like this line from the article:

> ...with the emphasis on limp. At some points, we are using over 100 GB of RAM... not ideal.

(so performance will be the next thing to be worked on to make this useable).

I think the goals of using gcc for rust is that it can provide a parallel implementation, which can help uncover bugs and provide more stability to the entire language, and because if there is a large gcc project already, they may be reticent to introduce LLVM as a dependency as well.

> reticent

That is a $200 word right there, and you're using it wrong.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reticent (2)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/can-reticent-mean-re...

You're correct that some people recommend against it, and it's only been in use since the second world war.

I only knew of the "reluctant" meaning.

Languages mutate quickly.

Yep, it's what I've heard most often too (I only just learnt the other meaning from the kind person prompting me look up the definition). I also don't think of it as that much of an unusual word, but hey.

It's also Merriam-Webster, a descriptivist dictionary. Others are of a prescriptionist bent. For example, Cambridge: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/retic...

More on prescriptive vs descriptive: https://twominenglish.com/prescriptivist-vs-descriptivist/

I personally am more descriptivist when it comes to English. It is also a lot of fun to bring some M-W citations in order to "Well, actually" someone who is "Well, actually"-ing.

Reticent is a valid synonym of reluctant.

And let's not forget that bootstrapping rust using something other than rust is quite useful.

You can't use this implementation to bootstrap Rust (in the sense of bootstrapping from non-Rust language or a compiler that isn't the rustc).

This GCC support here is only a backend in the existing Rust compiler written in Rust. The existing Rust compiler is using GCC as a language-agnostic assembler and optimizer, not as a Rust compiler. The GCC part doesn't even know what Rust code looks like.

There is a different project meant to reimplement Rust (front end) from scratch in C++ in GCC itself, but that implementation is far behind and can't compile non-toy programs yet.

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