Comment by MaxBarraclough

> I've experienced a huge amount of friction trying to enable features that cost something resembling 0.5% of fleet performance, even when they provide massive benefits. 12% loss would be laughed out of the room.

A 12% difference in performance between two compilers, for some given application, is possible even between two of the best optimising compilers available. A 12% performance lag does not necessarily relegate a compiler to obscurity.

The long-entrenched MSVC compiler is still a major player despite that, for at least some applications and for at least some compiler versions, Clang outperforms it by far more than 12%. [0][1]

If a new Rust compiler really could offer significantly fewer compiler bugs, that would of course need to be weighed against any performance penalty, and the proper tradeoff would of course depend on the project.

> I agree that this is an impressive feat. I also don't see why an equivalent for rust would be adopted.

I imagine it wouldn't be widely adopted for most applications. CompCert itself is pretty niche. It's not Free and Open Source software, which I suspect is a factor, alongside its technical drawbacks.

Unless you're working on ultra-low-defect software, such as in a safety-critical domain, compiler bugs are unlikely to be a major factor in your software's quality. If the compiler lacks support for interesting language features, it becomes an even harder sell for 'ordinary' projects that are able to tolerate an ordinary number of compiler bugs.

[0] https://lemire.me/blog/2023/02/27/visual-studio-versus-clang...

[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/using-clang-cl-for-better-perfo...