Sounds like this can be solved by adding support to LLVM. I realize that might be a tall order, but isn't that preferable to locking entire platforms out of a popular new language forever?

  > The LLVM developers have been somewhat leery of taking on new architectures, unless they can be convinced there will be long-term support for them, which is understandable, but makes the problem even worse. 

Surely, if people actually care about these platforms there would be people willing to commit to this long term? If not, are people saying that everything needs to support all the GCC-supported platforms forever?

I was wondering the same thing. It's not as though LLVM is some niche project that only Rust is using; it's the backend for a large number of compilers, and I imagine this will continue to be the case moving forward. There are now even languages that are written in languages that use LLVM for their backend, like gleam [1].

I think, ideally, there would be a concerted effort to extend LLVM compatibility to those platforms. But I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that there simply won't be--I sometimes run into problems on aarch64, and most of these are far more niche than that. As the article mentioned, it seems likely that eventually the ability for certain platforms for get support on new compilers will be a make-or-break for their ability to stay current with upgrades for a lot of the more fundamental packages.

Alternatively, I guess, there could be effort to get a new gcc-backend for more langauges; I believe there's an ongoing effort for Rust[2], but who knows down the line what that might look like. Eventually, this will probably need to come to a head.

[1] https://gleam.run/

[2] https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs