November 2023 Monthly report

Overview

Thanks again to Open Source Security, inc and Embecosm for their ongoing support for this project.

Milestone Progress

This month, work has started on format_args!(), one of the last pieces of the puzzle for the feature wishlist of GCC 14.1. As a reminder, once that compiler macro will be implemented, you will have access to macros such as println! and format! in gccrs, thus enabling you to finally run one of the most complex Rust programs out there:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!")
}

In other technical compiler frontend news, Pierre-Emmanuel worked hard this month to make our parser more permissive, by allowing more “invalid” Rust constructs to be parsed and then later rejected during a new AST validation pass. The rustc testsuite expects to parse some of these invalid constructs, such as “unsafe modules” or “const trait functions” - which could be useful for later features of the language. For example, “async trait functions” were rejected until recently - but they are now being integrated to stable Rust. It makes sense then that our parser allows such constructs, but rejects them later on once we know more about the current Rust edition we are targeting, and which unstable features we’ve enabled. Further in the compiler pipeline, Raiki Tamura, one of our 2023 GSoC student is continuing to work on v0 name mangling - an important backend feature for the compilation of the Rust-for-Linux project.

More work is being done on the borrow-checker by Jakub Dupak, who had to fight various parts of our type checker in order to propagate lifetime information all the way to his compiler pass. While this does not add any new borrow checking errors, it is very important that all that information is being used properly in order to keep going with the borrow-checking feature.

Finally, Pierre-Emmanuel and Arthur are finalizing the FOSDEM talks that they will be submitting, and work on a joint blogpost with the Rust project has started again - which we will share here once we are more advanced.

Community call

We will have our next monthly community call on the 11th of December

1. You can subscribe to our calendar to see when the next one will be held. The call is open to everyone, even if you would just like to sit-in and listen. You can also subscribe to our mailing-list or join our Zulip chat to be notified of upcoming events.

• jitsi link
• Calendar ID: 7060a0923ffebd3cb52b1afef35a28ff7b64f05962c9af84c23b1847f1f5f894@group.calendar.google.com
• Google calendar link
• iCal link

Call for contribution

This is a new section for particularly easy or interesting issues we would like folks external to the project to contribute to. We are available for mentoring and guiding you on their resolution. This is a great way to start making your mark on a complex project such as this one and to learn a lot in the process!

• WIN64 is a predefined constant by GCC on MinGW-w64 Issue 2768
• Emit error on async trait functions Issue 2767

Check out our Contributing guidelines to get started on them or feel free to send us a message on Zulip or IRC!

Completed Activities

• Add test for binding name resolution scope PR2766
• gccrs: Remove backend dependancy on resolution rib information PR2765
• Remove class ```AST::InherentImplItem``` PR2764
• Make early name resolver inherit from default one PR2762
• Change attribute checker visitor to use default visitor PR2760
• Change feature gate visitor to use default visitor PR2759
• Ast validation trait const PR2753
• Unsafe module PR2752
• Split async and const function qualifiers PR2751
• Add AST union validation PR2750
• Auto trait AST validation PR2749
• Reject regular variadic functions PR2748
• fixup: Ensure buffer allocation for bootstrap PR2746
• Keyword list rework PR2743
• Add `use` declaration resolution PR2742
• Prevent const self ptr PR2741
• Add base for late name resolution 2.0 PR2740
• Add ForeverStack APIs for Name Resolution 2.0 PR2739
• Added support to Parse ASYNC function PR2736
• Further ast validation PR2729
• Bump actions/upload-artifact from v2 to v3 PR2728
• Move ast collector template implementation PR2727
• v0-mangle closures PR2722
• Ast refactor PR2721
• Fix pub type parsing in trait PR2720
• Remove obsolete HIR::BorrowExpr::double_borrow PR2719
• Fix more tuple indices PR2717
• Replace ```AST::Method``` with existing ```AST::Function``` PR2715
• Reject const item with no value in impl context PR2713
• Parse variadic functions PR2701
• Create base class for ```TupleStructItems``` and ```TuplePatternItems``` PR2699
• Adjust item kind enums for ```TupleStructItems``` and ```TuplePatternItems``` PR2698
• Fix token lexed as a float literal PR2694

Contributors this month

• Manoj Kumar
• Jakub Dupak
• Marc Poulhiès
• Owen Avery
• Raiki Tamura

Overall Task Status

Test Cases

Bugs

Milestones Progress

Testing project

Planned Activities

• Opaque types
• Drop marker trait

Risks

Detailed changelog