March 2024 Monthly report

Overview

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

Project update

This month saw another influx of new contributors as the start of GSoC approaches. This year looks to be very promising, with a lot of proposals received for the GCC project as a whole, and a lot of them being dedicated specifically to gccrs. 21 proposals were sent to the organization, which is similar to last year with 23 proposals. In the same vein, gccrs proposals totaled 7 submissions, compared to 8 last year.

The proposals we’ve read so far are of high quality and very well written. Our three mentors, Philip, Pierre-Emmanuel and Arthur, are reviewing them and will choose applicants in the next week or so.

The major news this month is the fast approaching release of GCC 14.1. We are hard at work, trying to fix as many bugs as possible and add as many features as we can before that deadline. We are excited for you to be able to try them out, and are looking forward to the numerous bug reports. As a reminder, gccrs will not be suitable for real use cases in its first release yet, and will still require you to pass additional options to ensure you understand the risks of using such an experimental compiler. We are thankful for all of the folks who will try our project out.

We have made last minutes changes to GCC’s build system in order to improve the situation with our new dependency on Rust - the project will now error out early if you do not have Rust installed, so as to prevent this error happening down the line after 75% of the compilation of the project is done. This patch is currently being reviewed and will be upstreamed soon. After this, we will resume upstreaming the technical contributions we’ve made in the past two weeks or so.

These contributions concern the expansion of format_args!() macro invocations, as well as the expansion of for-loops, both necessary for the println!() macro to be implemented. Pierre-Emmanuel has also made great progress on our name resolution rewrite in order to support glob imports, which were previously unhandled in the project. Finally, Jakub Dupak made further progress on the borrow checker, emitting more facts for the polonius-engine library and thus adding more and more infrastructure for more and more borrow-checking static analysis.

Community call

We will have our next monthly community call on the 15th of April at 10am UTC. 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

Completed Activities

• raw-strings: Remove dg-excess-error directive PR2936
• Recognize rustc_deprecated as a builtin attribute PR2932
• Improve parsing of raw string literals PR2931
• Improve parsing of raw byte string literals PR2930
• Recognize unstable as a builtin attribute PR2929
• Avoid parsing const unsafe/extern functions as async PR2928
• Merge upstream, 2024-01-09 PR2926
• Fix typo PR2922
• macro: Use MacroInvocation’s node_id in ExternalItem constructor. PR2918
• ci: Install Rust directly from rustup instead of apt PR2917
• fixed README.md , dump ast using correct option PR2914
• Merge upstream, 2023-10-18 PR2912
• Store visibility properly in ExternalTypeItem: Fixes #2897 PR2911
• unify: Always coerce `!` to the target type. PR2909
• Clean BiMap to use tl::optional for lookups PR2896
• Add error emitting when we can’t resolve id expr PR2895
• Expand FormatArgs node as AST pass PR2893
• Ensure ```TupleStructPattern``` and ```TuplePattern``` have items PR2887
• Borrowck stage2 PR2885
• First stab at issue 2855 by spltting the two maps PR2874
• Remove references to smart pointers in the AST API PR2867
• Unify `AST::ExternalFunctionItem` with `AST::Function` PR2849
• Borrowck: variance analysis PR2823
• Name resolution globbing PR2796

Contributors this month

• Sourabh Raj Jaiswal (new contributor!)
• zhanghe (new contributor!)
• Thomas Schwinge
• Jasmine Tang
• Gyanendra Banjare
• Jakub Dupak
• Owen Avery
• Guillaume Gomez

Overall Task Status

Test Cases

Bugs

Milestones Progress

Testing project

Planned Activities

• Finish release preparations
• Proper extern type support, important for format_args!()
• More name resolution 2.0 fixes

Risks

Detailed changelog