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What the hell is a target triple?

mcyoung.xyz

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Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#21

Post by forrestthewoods »

throw0101d wrote: post #15

Noticed endians listed in the table. It seems like little-endian has basically taken over the world in 2025: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Hardware Is there anything that is used a lot that is not little? IBM's stuff? Network byte order is BE: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Networking

BE isn’t technically dead buts it’s practically dead for almost all projects. You can static_assert byte order and then never think about BE ever again.

All of my custom network serialization formats use LE because there’s literally no reason to use BE for network byte order. It’s pure legacy cruft.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#22

Post by dharmab »

throw0101d wrote: post #15

Noticed endians listed in the table. It seems like little-endian has basically taken over the world in 2025: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Hardware Is there anything that is used a lot that is not little? IBM's stuff? Network byte order is BE: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Networking

LEON, used by the European Space Agency, is big endian.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#23

Post by bregma »

compyman wrote: post #6
Retr0id wrote: post #2

Note 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.

Heck, it hasn't been true since the 1950s. Consider it as "has never been true".

Oh, sure, there have been plenty of native-host-only compilers. It was never a property of all compilers, though. Most system brings-ups, from the mainframes of the 1960s through the minis of the 1970s to the micros and embeddeds of the 1980s and onwards have required cross compilers.

I think what he means is that a single-target toolchain is an anachronism. That's also not true, since even clang doesn't target everything under the sun in one binary. A toolchain needs far more than a compiler, for a start; it needs the headers and libraries and it needs a linker. To go from source to executable (or herd of dynamic shared objects) requires a whole lot more than installing the clang (or whatever front-end) binary and choosing a nifty target triple. Most builds of clang don't even support all the interesting target triples and you need to build it yourself, which require a lot more computer than I can afford.

Target triples are not even something limited to toolchains. I maintain software that gets cross-built to all kinds of targets all the time and that requires target triples for the same reasons compilers do. Target triples are just a basic tool of the trade if you deal with anything other than scripting the browser and they're a solved problem rediscovered every now and then by people who haven;t studied their history.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#24

Post by peterldowns »

Some other sources of target triples (some mentioned in the article, some not):

rustc: `rustc --print target-list`

golang: `go tool dist list`

zig: `zig targets`

As the article point out, the complete lack of standardization and consistency in what constitutes a "triple" (sometimes actually a quad!) is kind of hellishly hilarious.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#25

Post by cbmuser »

»32-bit x86 is extremely not called “x32”; this is what Linux used to call its x86 ILP324 variant before it was removed.«

x32 support has not been removed from the Linux kernel. In fact, we‘re still maintaining Debian for x32 in Debian Ports.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#26

Post by AceJohnny2 »

Offtopic, but I'm distracted by the opening example:

> After all, you don’t want to be building your iPhone app on literal iPhone hardware.

iPhones are impressively powerful, but you wouldn't know it from the software lockdown that Apple holds on it.

Example: https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-16-is-actual...

There's a reason people were clamoring for Apple to make ARM laptops/desktops for years before Apple finally committed.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#27

Post by nemothekid »

bruce343434 wrote: post #18

Why does this person have such negative views of GCC and positive bias towards LLVM?

If OP is above 30 - it's probably due to the frustration of trying to modularize GCC that led to the creation of LLVM in the first place. If OP is below 30, it's probably because he grew up in a world where most compiler research and design is done on LLVM and GCC is for grandpa.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#28

Post by kbolino »

thro3838484848 wrote: post #19
throw0101d wrote: post #15

Noticed endians listed in the table. It seems like little-endian has basically taken over the world in 2025: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Hardware Is there anything that is used a lot that is not little? IBM's stuff? Network byte order is BE: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Networking

Java VM is BE.

This is misleading at best. The JVM only exposes multibyte values to ordinary applications in such a way that byte order doesn't matter. You can't break out a pointer and step through the bytes of a long field to see what order it's in, at least not without the unsafe memory APIs.

In practice, any real JVM implementation will simply use native byte order as much as possible. While bytecode and other data in class files is serialized in big endian order, it will be converted to native order whenever it's actually used. If you do pull out the unsafe APIs, you can see that e.g. values are little endian on x86(-64). The JVM would suffer from major performances issues if it tried to impose a byte order different from the underlying platform.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#29

Post by matheusmoreira »

bruce343434 wrote: post #18

Why does this person have such negative views of GCC and positive bias towards LLVM?

Good question. Author is incredibly hostile to one of the most important pieces of software ever developed because of the way they approached the problem nearly 40 years ago. Then he criticizes Go for trying to redesign the system instead of just using target triples...

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#30

Post by formerly_proven »

throw0101d wrote: post #15

Noticed endians listed in the table. It seems like little-endian has basically taken over the world in 2025: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Hardware Is there anything that is used a lot that is not little? IBM's stuff? Network byte order is BE: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Networking

10 years ago the fastest BE machines that were practical were then-ten year old powermacs. This hasn’t really changed. I guess they’re more expensive now.
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