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LLVM is the real bottleneck here. I've worked with a platform that would have been easy to build a custom rust for (even if it wasn't officially supported), but was held up by the lack of LLVM support.

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Yep. But there are two different active projects for compiling Rust with a GCC backend at the moment (one as a completely new frontend written as part of the GCC codebase, one as a libgccjit backend for the existing Rustc), there's also a Cranelift backend for rustc that you could add new architecture support to, and LLVM does add new targets, it can just take a bit longer to get support into LLVM and they don't keep architectures that are lightly or unmaintained around as long as GCC does.

For instance, Tier 3 support for m68k-unknown-linux-gnu was recently stabilized in rustc as a result of m68k support landing in LLVM (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/RELEASES.md#co...), which has been one of the previous sticking points for Rust packaging on Linux distros, some of which still support m68k architectures.

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