Custom rustc backends

Before we get into the details of rustc_codegen_nvvm, we obviously need to explain what a codegen backend is!

Custom codegen backends are rustc’s answer to “well what if I want Rust to compile to X?”. This is a problem that comes up in many situations, especially conversations of “well LLVM cannot target this, so we are screwed”. To solve this problem, rustc decided to incrementally decouple itself from being attached/reliant on LLVM exclusively.

Previously, rustc only had a single codegen backend, the LLVM codegen backed. This translated MIR directly to LLVM IR. This is great if you just want to support LLVM, but LLVM is not perfect, and inevitably you will hit limits to what LLVM is able to do. Or, you may just want to stop using LLVM, LLVM is not without problems (it is often slow, clunky to deal with, and does not support a lot of targets).

Nowadays, rustc is almost fully decoupled from LLVM and it is instead generic over the codegen backend used. rustc instead uses a system of codegen backends that implement traits and then get loaded as dynamically linked libraries. This allows Rust to compile to virtually anything with a surprisingly small amount of work. At the time of writing, there are five publicly known codegen backends that exist:

• rustc_codegen_cranelift
• rustc_codegen_llvm
• rustc_codegen_gcc
• rustc_codegen_spirv
• rustc_codegen_nvvm, obviously the best codegen ;)

rustc_codegen_cranelift targets the cranelift backend, which is a codegen backend written in Rust that is faster than LLVM but does not have many optimizations compared to LLVM. rustc_codegen_llvm is obvious, it is the backend almost everybody uses which targets LLVM. rustc_codegen_gcc targets GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) which is able to target more exotic targets than LLVM, especially for embedded. rustc_codegen_spirv targets the SPIR-V (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation 5) format, which is a format mostly used for compiling shader languages such as GLSL or WGSL to a standard representation that Vulkan/OpenGL can use, the reasons why SPIR-V is not an alternative to CUDA/rustc_codegen_nvvm have been covered in the FAQ.

Finally, we come to the star of the show, rustc_codegen_nvvm. This backend targets NVVM IR for compiling Rust to GPU kernels that can be run by CUDA. What NVVM IR/libNVVM are has been covered in the CUDA section.

rustc_codegen_ssa

rustc_codegen_ssa is the central crate behind every single codegen backend and does much of the hard work. It abstracts away the MIR lowering logic so that custom codegen backends only have to implement some traits and the SSA codegen does everything else. For example:

• A trait for getting a type like an integer type.
• A trait for optimizing a module.
• A trait for linking everything.
• A trait for declaring a function.

And so on. You will find an SSA codegen trait in almost every file.