Re: Planned obsolescence ? (*BSD, Rust)

Man, I really hate to chime in on a big email chain as a random user, but...

I'm part of the Sega Dreamcast homebrew community and the bigger SH4 scene, and while sure, we're relatively ancient, there are actually a lot of us, and there is a LOT of love left for the target. We have had many, many people express interest in using Rust on the Dreamcast and SH4, and we have done everything in our power to personally help facilitate getting Rust support for our target in any way possible, including supporting the early work of GCCRS and have done a LOT of testing and experimenting with rustc_codegen_gcc on SH4, and even got it far enough along to run the Tokio async runtime and whole stdlib on the Dreamcast.

While I fully understand wanting to use Rust or not wanting to be held back by legacy hardware, I do wonder if the timeframe given is a bit aggressive given the fact that there are TWO avenues which would open up support for Rust to our platform which are both in the works...

On Tue, Nov 4, 2025 at 6:35 AM Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> wrote:

David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com> writes:
> The developer has decided to do a rewrite in Rust instead of some
> other memory safe language. There are certain advantages to going with
> the language more people know and use. Part of it is that systems that
> don't support Rust are going to be less and less capable of using
> modern software. (For a counter example, look at CVSup, written in

This sounds awful. Especially since it is a software issue: the hardware
is capable of running Rust, it’s just LLVM that doesn’t support it.

Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> writes:
> Perhaps if rust on GCC gives "enough rust" do compile the needed
> tools, it might be enough to support also architectures whic gcc
> supports, that is for now 68k, PPC, Alpa, HP-PA...
> [1] https://rust-gcc.github.io/

I asked in #gccrust IRC on oftc.net GCCrs about the state and sam
pointed me to a recent timeline update:

> We still think we'll be able to compile libcore before the end of the
> summer
…
> We expect to be able to compile some 1.49 code correctly next year
…
> The next targeted version will probably be rust 1.78 as we want to
> keep up with rust for linux. This shouldn't be too long
> -- https://lore.kernel.org/git/7bf054a1-0196-4ad8-aaa4-a432cd2c93a5@embecosm.com/

So maybe not kill support for old hardware when a solution may be
available next summer.

At that point it would be viable to ask people to test their projects
against GCCrs, too.

Best wishes,
Arne
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