> do you think GCC’s m68k backend (to pick an arbitrary one) has been as battle-tested as their AArch64 one
m68k might be a bad example to pick. I was using gcc to target m68k on netbsd in the mid 1990s. It's very battle tested.
Also, don't forget that m68k used to be in all of the macs that Apple sold at one point before they switched to powerpc (before switching to x86 and the current arm chips). You could use gcc (with mpw's libs and headers) on pre-osx (e.g. system 7) m68k macs.
> m68k might be a bad example to pick. I was using gcc to target m68k on netbsd in the mid 1990s. It's very battle tested.
That was 30 years ago! Having worked on LLVM: it's very easy for optimizing compilers to regress on smaller targets. I imagine the situation is similar in GCC.
(The underlying point is simpler: explicit is better than implicit, and all Rust is doing is front-loading the frustration from "this project was never tested on this platform but we pretend like it was" to "this platform is not well tested." That's a good thing.)
m68k might be a bad example to pick. I was using gcc to target m68k on netbsd in the mid 1990s. It's very battle tested.
Also, don't forget that m68k used to be in all of the macs that Apple sold at one point before they switched to powerpc (before switching to x86 and the current arm chips). You could use gcc (with mpw's libs and headers) on pre-osx (e.g. system 7) m68k macs.