yeah this makes no sense to me. Why would Rust limit the LLVM backend's ability to generate code for a particular platform?

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panzi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the claim is that GCC supports a few obscure platforms that LLVM doesn't. Don't ask me which, that is just the claim that I heard multiple times. So it's not Rust that limits platforms, but LLVM. And they say the GCC backend efforts of Rust are meant to deal with that.

	▲	bkallus 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Don't ask me which There are many. Two big ones are Alpha and PA-RISC. NetBSD and Linux continue to support both. Linux distro choices are pretty much limited to Gentoo though.

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steveklabnik 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

1. You've got the causality backwards. LLVM backends don't come for free, you have to write code to enable support for them.

2. LLVM does not support as many backends as GCC does, so even if you did get 100% of the LLVM supported backends up and running, you'd still be missing some.