CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gccarchitecturecompiler-constructioncpu-architecture
user4183195
user4183195

Reputation:

what is target architecture in computer science?

I am a beginner in programming and wanted to download a good C compiler to practice coding. So I thought of GCC and started a small research on it. I read a Wikipedia article on it. The article mentioned something about target architecture,which I do not know. Can anyone tell me what it means, and any source I can refer for more information. Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1365

Answers (1)

Matteo Pacini
Matteo Pacini

Reputation: 22846

The target architecture is the architecture which the compiler creates binary files for.

Common architectures are: i386 (Intel 32-bit), x86_64 (Intel 64-bit), armv7, arm64, etc...

GCC compiles C code (after the preprocessing stage) to assembly code, and the assembly code varies depending on the CPU architecture. The assembly code is then "assembled" to a binary file.

Something to keep in mind:

Two binary files are not guaranteed to be compatible across different operating systems despite sharing the same architecture.

A program compiled on Ubuntu Linux (let's say with arch x86_64) won't work on Windows (with same arc x86_64).

GCC identifies architectures by "triplets", like:

x86_64-apple-darwin14.0.0
i386-pc-mingw32
i686-pc-linux-gnu

Format is:

machine-vendor-operatingsystem (not always followed though)

They contain infos on both the architecture and the operating system.

Upvotes: 9

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