Is that expected to ever change and/or does Rust expect to work with other libcs (bionic? musl-libc?) Being able to build completely self-contained static binaries can be very nice at times, and for embedded use, glibc is pretty large...
I thought Rust used llvm for compilation? That makes the libgcc dependency seem a bit odd. Maybe I misunderstood?
Right now, it can't work with other libcs, but if you strip things down enough, it's not required to use glibc either, for example, if you're building an OS. You just end up throwing away a lot of the standard library. Check out stuff like http://zinc.rs/ for embedded Rust.
libgcc is used for stack unwinding, not for compilation. So it does seem a bit weird at first :)
I thought Rust used llvm for compilation? That makes the libgcc dependency seem a bit odd. Maybe I misunderstood?