Pretty wild to me that AI has enabled the commoditization of one of the gnarliest engineering problems. Over the course of just a month, we now have three "viable" AI-driven iteration-focused Rust compilers: - https://github.com/makepad/relax - https://github.com/DioxusLabs/rustd/ - https://github.com/indexable-inc/blaze

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medler a day ago | parent | next [-]

The Cranelift compiler is in the same space, has been around for over a decade, and is actively maintained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranelift

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zamadatix a day ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure the Rust JIT feature looks far enough along/well maintained enough to actually work with a typical rust program and when it does it sounds like it's probably slower than AOT anyways https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_cranelift/blob/ma...

I think it also only does the backend? I.e. you still need rustc to compiler to do everything but the codegen whereas this seems to be the whole compiler portion of the toolchain "Relax isn't a wrapper around rustc or a plugin for LLVM: it replaces both, and the parts of Cargo and the linker in between."

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shikck200 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cranelift never took off. Its weirdly bundled inside some adhoc wasm runtime, and is not a replacement for the "real" rust compiler.

	▲	uqers 21 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Doesn't cargo nightly ship with the cranelift backend? You do need to mess with rustup and cargo a bit, but it's not very difficult to use.
	▲	dabinat 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’ll honestly be surprised if Cranelift support ever gets stabilized. TPDE integration seems like something more likely to be eventually stabilized, although it is at an early stage right now.

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theknarf 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

blaze uses Cranelift under the hood, I'm not sure about the other two.

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392 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd like to throw my low-token-budget hat in the ring:

https://github.com/haydenflinner/rust/blob/main/PLIRON.md

iteration-focus is slightly there, i.e. fast hotpatching. But been focused on beating LLVM's compiled runtime performance as of late.

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steveklabnik 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve got one I haven’t made public yet as well…

	▲	_cart 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Excited to see what you've been cooking :)

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anonymous908213 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Viable" in scare quotes, as it should be. Note that the third one you listed is forked from the second one with licensing credit stripped. None of them are actually used by anybody programming anything real. Calling this commoditization is ridiculous. Commoditization of being able to post superficially impressive claims that get upvoted to the front of HN while drowning out content that has >0 value to anyone on the planet, I suppose.

	▲	_cart 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'll note that I _am_ also dubious of the lifespan / long term viability of these projects (easy come, easy go), and I agree that they're very rough / early stages right now. That being said, I'm not writing off their value either. I've played with all of them, and while they aren't bulletproof (I haven't managed to get Bevy to actually run with any of them), they are undeniably close to being viable.

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14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]