Microsoft doubles down on Rust

The secret sauce: a new Rust code generator

One key to delivering production-grade Windows software with Rust is a new code generation tool for Rust’s compiler, rustc. rustc is designed to use different code-generation back ends, beyond the default LLVM. There are already variants that work with GCC and with Cranelift. If you’ve not come across Cranelift, it’s the code generator of the Bytecode Alliance, used as part of the wasmtime framework. Adding a new code generator is a matter of building a tool that connects to the Rust compiler’s APIs, takes its bytecode output, generates native code, and passes it on to your choice of build pipeline.

This is the role of Microsoft’s rustc_codegen_utc tooling. It’s designed to work with the existing MSVC stack, giving Rust access to a mature, well-tested, proven part of the Windows development platform without needing any changes to your code (compatibility is baked in). This links it directly to the back end of the…