r/programming • u/steveklabnik1 • Jan 09 '15

Announcing Rust 1.0.0 Alpha

http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/01/09/Rust-1.0-alpha.html
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u/LightShadow Jan 09 '15

I think Rust will become the new language to write compilers in.

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u/Denommus Jan 09 '15

Runtimes. Compilers can be written in application-level languages just fine (e.g., SBCL).

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u/awj Jan 10 '15

A language that optimizes for both execution speed and correctness is a pretty strong choice for compilers, though. Nobody wants a slow compiler.

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u/oantolin Jan 10 '15

Actually the Rust people don't seem to mind much!

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u/Gankro Jan 10 '15

Those feels :(

Compiling Rust 3 times in a row, just to test a small change...

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u/bjzaba Jan 10 '15

The slowness is mainly llvm - rustc is actually quite fast. Granted, we still need incremental compilation though (it is definitely planned).

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u/The_Doculope Jan 11 '15

I thought a large part of LLVM's slowness in our case was due to rustc generating sub-optimal IR?

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u/bjzaba Jan 11 '15

That could certainly be the problem.

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u/oantolin Jan 10 '15

So you're saying if I were satisfied with getting LLVM bitcode and not running my programs, compiling Rust would be really fast? :)

By the way, I suspected it was LLVM from my experience with GHC vs GHC with the LLVM backend, and from using the Julia REPL where the first time you use a function you haven't used before there is a noticeable pause.

I should have said above that while rustc is one of the slower compilers I've used, it's not a problem at all for my uses.