I hope that some day ppc64{le,be} get there soon. Would love to use openpower based completly open systems. Atleast for the time-being only OpenPower matches or beats the performance profiles of x86_64.
I stand corrected: AArch64 is the only other architecture apart from x86_64 to have a target platform that is a Tier-1 target platform.
Attaining this ‘badge’ is significant for Rust’s future though in a world where AArch64 Linux is astonishingly predominant especially in areas where Rust’s safety properties are a good fit.
And just some clarification. This is only the first ARM Arch to get promoted to Tier-1. The idea is to first get this one to Tier-1 as it's the most obvious to do, and other ARM platforms will follow shortly. For example Apple ARM Archs I expect to soon follow.
Absolutely! One of the key goals I had in the RFC proposal was to effectively pipeclean the path for other non-x86_64 archs, not just AArch64.
For AArch64, you are absolutely right, there's a lot of useful targets already ascending the Tiers, aiming to get to Tier-1.
All this will help AArch64 in particular to ge the top-class CI focus that the Rust community has built. Bodes very well for safety and security sensitive ecosystems, IMO.
Yeah great, that makes Rust look like a good embedded language.
What about AVR though? I have been following the rust-avr fork for litterally years now, and it just got merged. It's still highly unreliable though, and Harvard architecture related bugs can make you pull your hairs.
If the rust community is going to promote embedded rust, it would be good to invest some effort in a wider spectrum of architectures. The language itself should be mature enough to take a break. Expanding the architecture range would be very welcome by a lot of people.
Effort is not fungible, we are an open source project, not a business. We can only do what we can convince people to spend their time doing. The folks who work on the language just aren’t the same people who would implement a new LLVM backend. We would love mature Rust support on as many platforms as possible, but it’s non-trivial.
In this case, ARM stepped up themselves to help make this happen. If other vendors want to help us make Rust great on their platform, we’d love to have their support.
