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What the hell is a target triple?

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Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#31

Post by boricj »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #26

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 A…

A more pertinent (if dated) example would be "you don't want to be building your GBA game on literal Game Boy Advance hardware".

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#36

Post by AceJohnny2 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #26

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 A…

I do not think I like this author...

> A critical piece of history here is to understand the really stupid way in which GCC does cross compiling. Traditionally, each GCC binary would be built for one target triple. [...] Nobody with a brain does this ^2

You're doing GCC a great disservice by ignoring its storied and essential history. It's over 40 years old, and was created at a time where there were no free/libre compilers. Computers were small and slow. Of course you wouldn't bundle multiple targets in one distribution.

LLVM benefitted from a completely different architecture and starting from a blank slate when computers were already faster and much larger, and was heavily sponsored by a vendor that was innately interested in cross-compiling: Apple. (Guess where LLVM's creator worked for years and lead the development tools team)

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#37

Post by xyst »

bruce343434 wrote: post #18

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

Seems to have a decent amount of knowledge in this domain in education and professional work. Author is from MIT so maybe professors had a lot of influence here.

also, gcc is relatively old and comes with a lot of baggage. LLVM is sort of the defacto standard now with improvements in performance

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#38

Post by o11c »

This article should be ignored, since it disregards the canonical origin of target triples (and the fact that it's linked to `configure`):

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/config.git/tree/

The `testsuite/` directory contains some data files with a fairly extensive list of known targets. The vendor field should be considered fully extensible, and new combinations of know machine/kernel/libc shouldn't be considered invalid, but anything else should have a patch submitted.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#39

Post by Skywalker13 »

bruce343434 wrote: post #18

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

It is unfortunate. GCC has enabled the compilation of countless lines of source code for nearly 40 years and has served millions of users. Regardless of whether its design is considered good or bad today, GCC has played an essential role and has enabled the emergence of many projects and new compilers. GCC deserves deep respect.

Re: What the hell is a target triple?

#40

Post by eqvinox »

formerly_proven wrote: post #30
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.

e6500/T4240 are faster than powermacs. Not sure how rare they are nowadays, we didn't have any trouble buying some (on eBay). 12×2 cores, 48GB RAM, for BE that's essentially heaven…
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