This RFC was previously approved, but part of it later withdrawn

The cfg(target = "...") conditional compilation key was previously approved, but was later withdrawn. For details, see the summary comment.

Summary

This proposes a new cfg: target, which matches the entire target triple string (e.g. arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf). This also adds a CARGO_CFG_TARGET environment variable for parity with other CARGO_CFG_* variables.

In addition, this proposes a shorthand cfg(target(...)) to match multiple components of a target string at once.

Motivation

To #[cfg] against a specific target, a build.rs script is required to emit a custom cfg based on the TARGET environment variable. Adding a build script increases compile time and makes a crate incompatible with certain build systems.

Otherwise, all available components would need to be specified separately: target_arch, target_vendor, target_os, target_env and target_abi. This can be very cumbersome. Note that the target ABI cannot currently be #[cfg]-ed against, so a build.rs is still necessary to match all target components.

Guide-level explanation

This would act like existing target_* configurations (except target_feature) but match against all components.

#[cfg(target = "x86_64-apple-ios-macabi")]
mod mac_catalyst;

This includes #[cfg_attr(target = "...", attr)].

It would also support to specify each target_* inside a new target attribute as follows:

// So we can for example rewrite:
#[cfg(all(target_os = "linux", target_arch = "arm"))]
// as:
#[cfg(target(os = "linux", arch = "arm"))]

Reference-level explanation

target is a key-value option set once with the target's Rust triple.

Example values:

  • "aarch64-apple-darwin"
  • "arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf"
  • "x86_64-apple-ios-macabi"
  • "x86_64-pc-windows-gnu"
  • "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc"
  • "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu"

Semantics of target with attributes

The shorthand form of #[cfg(target(os = "linux))] is expanded and entirely equivalent to #[cfg(target_os = "linux")] (and so on for arch and the other potential attributes).

Drawbacks

  • Configuring against specific targets can be overly strict and could make certain #[cfg]s miss similar configurations with small changes.

    For example: aarch64-unknown-none does not match aarch64-unknown-none-softfloat, yet one would likely want to include ABI variants. The same concern applies to the target vendor.

    A potential solution would be to allow glob matching (e.g. aarch64-unknown-none*), but that is not within the scope of this proposal because it is not currently used in other #[cfg]s.

  • The CARGO_CFG_TARGET environment variable is redundant with the existing TARGET. However, including it would be consistent with other CARGO_CFG_* variables.

Rationale and alternatives

We can keep the existing work-around of checking the TARGET environment variable in a build.rs script. However, that increases compile time and makes a crate incompatible with certain build systems.

Prior art

Unresolved questions

  • How do we ensure a project does not miss configurations similar to the ones being #[cfg]-ed against with this feature? Perhaps this should be added as a Clippy lint that's off by default.

Future possibilities

This would enable #[cfg]-ing against a specific target ABI (e.g. macabi, eabihf). However, that is not the motivation for this proposal and should be handled separately.