alt Hacker NewsAll of the front-end is in fact pure Rust, I know that because I am one of the huge number of authors. The backend, thus the code generation and many optimisations of the sort AoCO is about is LLVM.
We absolutely know that if Rust didn't offer LLVM you'd see C++ people saying "Rust doesn't even have a proper optimiser". So now what you're asking for isn't just "a Rust backend" which exists as others have discussed, but a Rust alternative to LLVM, multiple targets, lots of high quality optimisations, etc. presumably as a drop-in or close approximation since today people have LLVM and are in production with the resulting code.
Ignore them. Keep going. Debates like these are “Since you said X, Y can’t be true” kind of debates. As long as you have access to be able to do assembly, you should be able to do this. I say you because this is way out of my wheelhouse. I just want a cleaner, less mine-field laden, OO language that compiles to machine code. That’s it. We can stick a feather in this until this time a decade from now when we complain about it again.