from Hacker News

Cranelift, a low-level retargetable code generator written in Rust

by exrook on 8/10/18, 4:29 PM with 32 comments

• by smaddox on 8/11/18, 4:14 PM

  It's interesting that booleans are stored as 0 or -1 [1]. I wonder what drove that decision. I just checked, and Rust's LLVM stores booleans as 0 or 1.

  [1] https://cranelift.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ir.html#boolean-t...

• by seeekr on 8/11/18, 1:43 PM

  The README says:

  "Cranelift is designed to be a code generator for WebAssembly, but it is general enough to be useful elsewhere too. The initial planned uses that affected its design are:

  WebAssembly compiler for the SpiderMonkey engine in Firefox. Backend for the IonMonkey JavaScript JIT compiler in Firefox. Debug build backend for the Rust compiler."

• by xvilka on 8/11/18, 3:26 PM

  Hopefully will replace LLVM one day.

• by steveklabnik on 8/11/18, 3:30 PM

  Previously called “cretone”, by the way.

• by kodablah on 8/11/18, 3:38 PM

  Does it, or are there plans to, translate the IR to WASM (i.e. a WASM backend instead of just frontend)? This seems to have a more expressive set of instructions than WASM and could be a good target for compilers.

• by ndh2 on 8/11/18, 12:08 PM

  Any example or tutorial?

• by jeandejean on 8/11/18, 4:39 PM

  I understand the enthusiasm for Rust, but I'm growing tired of these project advertised as "written in Rust" like it proves a point in itself.