Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/845535/rss

There is always a certain amount of tension between the goals of those
using older, less-popular architectures and the goals of projects targeting
more mainstream users and systems. In many ways, our community has been
spoiled by the number of architectures supported by GCC, but a lot of new
software is not being written in C—and existing software is migrating away
from it.
The Rust language is
often the choice these days for both new and existing code bases, but it is
built with LLVM, which supports fewer architectures than GCC
supports—and Linux runs on. So the question that arises is how much these older, non-Rusty
architectures should be able to hold back future development; the answer,
in several places now, has been “not much”.