pingveno

When you’re talking about stack links, are you referring to how segmented stacks are implemented? Those were dropped from Rust a few years back. Panics also need a handler, which defaults to a shared implementation based on libunwind. However, I think an MVP could instead just abort and leave unwinding to be implemented later. Normal operations would need some work on things like compiler intrinsics. I would offer to get involved, but I have no real experience in compilers so this would be far beyond my comfort level.

Speaking of Rust, it would be interesting to at some point get support for the Mill architecture. The Rust compiler uses LLVM as a backend, so on a technical level it should be relatively easy to add support. Rust has a tier support system, so introducing a tier 3 target is a relatively low bar. Rust does have a patched version of LLVM bundled with it, so that might cause some issues.

Maybe Wasmer? It looks like it can use LLVM as its backend. Wasmtime also looks promising, but would need extra work to get the Cranelift compiler working on it. Either one would need some work to get Rust functioning on Mill, though.

I don’t see advantages of using WASM on the server/desktop for anything but C/C++ code though, but the Rust community seems to also have adopted it for some reason… Maybe just hype?

The Rust community jumped in early on in WASM’s development in creating tooling and support libraries. From what I understand, some of the prominent tools that also support C/C++ were first developed by Rust teams. It was seen as a growth niche that didn’t really have a dominant language yet, unlike most other areas Rust excels at where there are strong incumbent languages.

From what I’ve seen, there are some pretty nice browser frameworks that are in the works for Rust WASM. On the desktop, I would expect the first uses to come with speeding up critical portions of Electron-based applications. For server software in general, WASI seems to developed with both C and Rust as primary targets to keep in mind.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by  pingveno.