>There’s a few variants. wasm32-unknown-unknown (here using unknown instead of none as the system, oops)
Why isn't it called wasm32-none-none?
What the hell is a target triple?
81–90 of 139 posts
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
IBM's Power chips can run in either little or big modes, but "used a lot" is a stretch
Most PowerPC related stuff (e.g. Freescale MPC5xx found in a bunch of automotiver applications) can run in either big or little endian mode, as can most ARM and MIPS (routers, IP cameras) stuff. Can't think of the last time I've seen any of them configured to run in big endian mode tho.
For the large Power ISA machines, it's most commonly when running AIX or IBM i these days, though the BSDs generally run big too.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#83Noticed 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
Apart from IBM Power/AIX systems, SPARC/Solaris is another one. I wouldn't say either of these are used a lot, but there's a reasonable amount of legacy systems out there that are still being supported by IBM and Oracle.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#84Some 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.
at least we don't have to deal with --build, --host, --target nonsense anymore
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
"This was the right way to do it forty years ago, so that's why the experience is worse" isn't a compelling reason for a user to suffer today. Also, in this specific case, this ignores the history around LLVM offering itself up to the FSF. gcc could have benefitted from this fresh start too. But purely by accident, it did not.
> "This was the right way to do it forty years ago, so that's why the experience is worse" isn't a compelling reason for a user to suffer today.
On my system, "dnf repoquery --whatrequires cross-gcc-common" lists 26 gcc-*-linux-gnu packages (that is, kernel / firmware cross compilers for 26 architectures). The command "dnf repoquery --whatrequires cross-binutils-common" lists 31 binutils-*-linux-gnu packages.
The author writes, "LLVM and all cross compilers that follow it instead put all of the backends in one binary". Do those compilers support 25+ back-ends? And if they do, is it good design to install back-ends for (say) 23 such target architectures that you're never going to cross-compile for, in practice? Does that benefit the user?
My impression is that the author does not understand the modularity of gcc cross compilers / packages because he's unaware of (or doesn't care for) the scale that gcc aims at.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#86"And no, a “target quadruple” is not a thing and if I catch you saying that I’m gonna bonk you with an Intel optimization manual. " https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/20690
The argument is that they're called triples even when they've got more or less components than 3. They should have simply been called target tuples or target monikers.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#87Great article but I was really put off by this bit, which aside from being very condescending, simply isn't true and reveals a lack of appreciation for the innovation that I would have thought someone posting about target triples and compilers would have appreciated: > Why the Windows people invented a whole other ABI instead of making things clean and simple like Apple did with Rosetta on ARM MacBooks? I have no ide…
Do those criticisms of Rosetta hold for Rosetta 2?
I assumed the author was talking about the x86 emulator released for the arm migration a few years ago, not the powerpc one.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fil…
One relatively commonly used class which exposes this is ByteBuffer and its Int/Long variants, but there you can specify the endianness explicitly (or set it to match the native one).
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#89Sorry, going to keep typing x64. Unlike the article's recommendation of x86, literally everyone knows exactly what it means at all times.
Re: What the hell is a target triple?
#90>There’s a few variants. wasm32-unknown-unknown (here using unknown instead of none as the system, oops) Why isn't it called wasm32-none-none?
As far as I can tell, it's because libstd exists (but is full of do-nothing stubs). There is another `wasm32-none` target which is no_std.