Howdy! I'm new here and recently decided to start learning Rust. I'm really excited to get into this ecosystem and start developing software! My background is mostly in scripting with bash, design and digital art, and 3D graphics.

I'm also into retro game consoles. Lately, I've been wondering how feasible it would be to get Rust compiling for the Nintendo GameCube. The GameCube is an embedded home console device circa 2001 with a 485 MHz 32-bit PowerPC 750 "Gekko" CPU with some special enhancements for fast vector processing. It has 24 MB or SRAM, 16 MB of "ARAM" (dedicated RAM for fast asynchronous audio processing), and a custom fixed-function graphics chip called the "GX".

Honestly, I feel a system like this would be an ideal candidate for learning Rust, as my interest is primarily in doing 3D graphics and game engine development. How much work would it take to get Rust to compile on a system such as this? From what I can gather asking AI, Rust at least partially relies on SPIRV for compiling, which already supports the GameCube, so theoretically Rust wouldn't be impossible to port over. The hard part would maybe be getting it to play well with the GameCube C libraries like LibOGC2? The benefit of getting it compiling on the GameCube is that getting it to work on the Wii would basically be free as they are essentially the same hardware!

I thought I'd come here and ask about it since I'm just getting into systems programming. I think it would be really cool if we get Rust compiling for the GameCube as I'd personally love to learn that way. I have a few ideas in mind for software projects I'd like to tackle on the GameCube, and I'd love to do that in Rust if that is something feasible in the near future.

Is anybody interested in getting Rust to target a system like this? How much work would that entail? Is this likely to happen? Is this something someone like me would be capable of, given my inexperience with low level programming?

Thanks for reading!
Cheers

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