Rust on Dreamcast
Preliminary support exists for developing for the Dreamcast using the Rust programming language. This is a bit of a challenge, however, as the official Rust compiler is based on the LLVM toolchain infrastructure, which does not support the Dreamcast's CPU SuperH architecture. Dreamcast programming is instead done with GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection toolchain. There exists two solutions to this problem:
- rustc_codegen_gcc: A libgccjit codegen backend for rustc (preferred method)
- gccrs: a Rust frontend for GCC
rustc_codegen_gcc
gccrs
gccrs implements a Rust compiler frontend for GCC. This essentially means implementing a new Rust compiler from the ground up using the GCC toolchain infrastructure. This project is in early stages and is targeting the Rust 1.49 revision from December 2020. As of this writing (February 2024), it is not yet able to compile Rust's libcore
, so many basic language features are unimplemented or not functional. Additionally, Rust standard tooling like cargo
is not available, nor is borrow checking implemented. It is possible to use this compiler by compiling either GCC 14.0.1-dev or GCCRS git repo.