(Almost) Everything You Should Know About The Compiler Frontend
summary
Rustc’s frontend walks source through parsing, macro expansion, resolution, HIR lowering, and finally MIR where borrow checking and codegen-ready transforms run. The query system caches expensive results, supports incremental compilation and on‑demand recomputation. The pipeline assigns def IDs, lowers syntactic sugar into HIR and then into middle/mir forms, uses inference contexts and obligation queues with probe/rollback for method selection, and rechecks lifetimes on MIR to produce precise NLL diagnostics.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (12)
- 0:00Compiler frontend intro
- 1:29Talk overview and phases
- 3:36Parsing and entry points
- 7:49Macro expansion process
- 10:41Late identifier resolution
- 14:11Query system and incremental
- 19:06HIR lowering and type prep
- 25:02Lifetime resolution and MIR
- 28:40Type inference contexts
- 39:07Function and expression types
- 48:37MIR lowering and borrow check
- 55:39Final phases and Q&A
related talks
25m"Compiler-Driven Development: Making Rust Work for You"
25mMaking Tools for Rust: An Introduction to the Compiler and How It Can Help You
26mHow Rust Compiles - Noratrieb
27mRust GCC Front-end
38mThe Rust Borrow Checker: a Deep Dive
09mRustc: How I Learned to Respect the Compiler
29mMacromancy: an introduction to Rust macros
36mThe Rust Borrow Checker: A Deep Dive