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Comment by profquail | Hacker News Reader

Why not write the code in C# (for example) and extract it to $SYSTEM_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE? It wouldn't be much different than what Xamarin are doing now for creating iOS and Android apps with C#.

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Using C as an output language, backed by guarantees at the higher level, could certainly work. I believe ATS [1] works this way, and can even avoid garbage collection altogether if desired. I understand it is not an easy language, though.

Nimrod [2] also generates C, but as I understand it garbage collection is unavoidable.

[1] http://www.ats-lang.org/

[2] http://nimrod-lang.org/

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.

> removed LLVM C backend

What are you referring to here?

LLVM used to have a backend that could convert its low-level bitcode to portable C.

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.

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.

Because if you write that in C#, you have to bundle 54MB common runtime and GC withit.

Did you actually read my entire comment, or did you just see "C#" and post a knee-jerk reaction? If you extract code from C# to C, you don't need a GC or any of the .NET class libraries -- you'd just have a standalone C file to use like any other.

> If you extract code from C# to C, you don't need a GC or any of the .NET class libraries

The problem is, you do need them. There's no 1:1 C# -> C extraction. You have to extract at least some part of the CLR along with.

Perhaps another way of saying this is that you will always need a runtime. And if you reimplement the portions of the runtime that you need in C, you've essentially re-implemented .NET.

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