I found this via Alex Crichton:
A new paper has been published fuzzing Rust’s new Cranelift backend. Being relatively new compared to the LLVM backend, the author hypothesized that it would likely be more buggy.
But nope, not at all. They were unable to find *any* new bugs using their fuzzer (Rustlantis). While that doesn’t mean Cranelift is free from bugs, it’s still a strong signal for how reliable we can expect Cranelift to be.
The author hypothesized that this is likely because Cranelift performs fewer optimizations compared to LLVM. But also because of Cranelift’s focus on fuzzing and formal methods to preserve quality.
My understanding is, and I may be wrong here, that the goal is to over time increase the number of optimizations Cranelift can perform. As Cranelift’s scope broadens, it’s going to be really interesting to see its approach to engineering scale up.