Description
This is a follow-up issue from #4550.
std.zig.CrossTarget
has the ability to represent CPU features, as well as std.Target
.
Curently, "parsing" a target triple also wants to know the CPU model name and feature set at the same time, in order to produce a target. So this is a proposal to merge the concepts together. It mainly involves the CLI.
The proposal is to change this (example):
-target arm-linux-gnu -mcpu=generic+v8a-neon
to this:
-target arm.generic+v8a~neon-linux-gnu
The main idea here is that -mcpu
is deleted as a command line parameter, and -target
gains even more expressiveness.
This works by replacing -
with ~
, because -
is a field separator in the -target
command line parameter. This would not affect the #3089 CLI which would have -mcpu
to match C compilers. Note that ~
means "binary not" in many contexts, which would be a reasonable mnemonic to remember the syntax by.
The main area where this would be helpful would be the Zig build system, because standardTargetOptions
would only need to be concerned with -Dtarget
rather than -Dtarget
and -Dmcpu
. The fact that CPU features are part of both std.Target
and std.zig.CrossTarget
is a strong hint that this data belongs together.
As another example, std.zig.CrossTarget.parse
wants to know the -mcpu
parameter in order to produce a result:
zig/lib/std/zig/cross_target.zig
Lines 168 to 219 in 7e6b68a