What the hell is a target triple?
mcyoung.xyz
What the hell is a target triple?
1–10 of 139 posts
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#2Note to author, I'm not sure the word "anachronism" is being used correctly in the intro.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#3The author's blog is a FANTASTIC source of information. I recommend checking out some of their other posts:
- https://mcyoung.xyz/2021/06/01/linker-script/
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#4I think GCC's more-or-less equivalent to Clang's --target is called -B: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Directory-Options.html#in...
I assume it works with an all-targets binutils build. I haven't seen anyone building their cross-compilers in this way (at least not in recent memory).
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#5I did start to try to take clang's TargetInfo code (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/clang/lib/Bas...) and porting it over to TableGen, primarily so somebody could actually extract useful auto-generated documentation out of it, like "What are all the targets available?"
I actually do have working code for the triple-to-TargetInfo instantiation portion (which is fun because there's one or two cases that juuuust aren't quite like all of the others, and I'm not sure if that's a bad copy-paste job or actually intentional). But I never got around to working out how to actually integrate the actual bodies of TargetInfo implementations--which provide things like the properties of C/C++ fundamental types or default macros--into the TableGen easily, so that patch is still merely languishing somewhere on my computer.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#6Note to author, I'm not sure the word "anachronism" is being used correctly in the intro.
I think the meaning is that the idea that compilers can only compile for their host machine is an ananchronism, since that was historically the case but is no longer true.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#7I think GCC's more-or-less equivalent to Clang's --target is called -B: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Directory-Options.html#in... I assume it works with an all-targets binutils build. I haven't seen anyone building their cross-compilers in this way (at least not in recent memory).
I haven't either, probably because it would require building once per target and installing all the individual binaries.
This is one of the biggest differences between clang and GCC: clang has one binary that supports multiple targets, while a GCC build is always target-specific.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#8Funny thing I found when I gave up trying to find documentation and read the LLVM source code (seems to be what happened to the author too!): there are actually five components of the triple, not four.
I can't remember what the fifth one is, but yeah... insane system.
Thanks for writing this up! I wonder if anyone will ever come up with something more sensible.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#9Note to author, I'm not sure the word "anachronism" is being used correctly in the intro.
It's being used correctly: something that is conspicuously old-fashioned for its environment is an anachronism. A toolchain that only supports native builds fits.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#10The author's blog is a FANTASTIC source of information. I recommend checking out some of their other posts: - https://mcyoung.xyz/2021/06/01/linker-script/ - https://mcyoung.xyz/2023/08/09/yarns/ - https://mcyoung.xyz/2023/08/01/llvm-ir/
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