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Comment by johncolanduoni | Hacker News Reader

You almost certainly have a bunch of devices containing a microcontroller that runs an architecture not targeted by LLVM. The embedded space is still incredibly fragmented.

That said, only a handful of those architectures are actually so weird that they would be hard to write a LLVM backend for. I understand why the project hasn’t established a stable backend plugin API, but it would help support these ancillary architectures that nobody wants to have to actively maintain as part of the LLVM project. Right now, you usually need to use a fork of the whole LLVM project when using experimental backends.

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> You almost certainly have a bunch of devices containing a microcontroller that runs an architecture not targeted by LLVM.

This is exactly what I'm saying. Do you think HW drives SW or the other way around? When Rust is in the Linux kernel, my guess is it will be very hard to find new HW worth using, which doesn't have some Rust support.

In embedded, HW drives SW much more than the other way around. Most microcontrollers are not capable of running a Linux kernel as it is, even with NoMMU. The ones that are capable of this are overwhelmingly ARM or RISC-V these days. There’s not a long list of architectures supported by the modern Linux kernel but not LLVM/Rust.

How many of them are running Linux, and how many of them are running a modern kernel?

Almost none of them, but that doesn’t make them “places no one uses”, considering everyone who can see these words is looking at a device with a bunch of C firmware running on microcontrollers all over the place.

> but that doesn’t make them “places no one uses

You're putting words in my mouth there - that's not my point.

My point is that if they're not running linux, and the ones that are aren't running a modern kernel, then we shouldn't hold back development of modern platforms for ones that refuse to keep up.

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